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Warner Bros.
The trailer for the latest Wuthering Heights adaptation starring Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi has dropped - and the upcoming film continues to cause controversy.
Since news of the Emerald Fennell-directed project was announced last year, fans of the 1847 Emily Brontë novel raised concerns about how closely it will follow the original source material.
The story of Wuthering Heights follows the relationship between the Earnshaws and the Lintons in 1770s rural Yorkshire, in particular the intense and tumultuous relationship between Catherine Earnshaw and Heathcliff.
It also stars Hong Chau as Nelly Dean, Alison Oliver as Isabella Linton, Shazad Latif as Edgar Linton, and Owen Cooper as the younger Heathcliff, who had his breakout role in the Netflix show Adolescence.
Margot Robbie as Catherine Earnshaw (left) and Jacob Elordi as Heathcliff (right)Warner Bros.
Choices made for the film have already been scrutinised, such as casting Elordi when in the books Heathcliff is described as having dark hair, dark eyes, dark skin, and is thought to have come from a Roma or Gypsy background.
Robbie's casting has also raised eyebrows, given that Catherine has brown hair and is in her late teens when she dies in the book, in contrast to Robbie, who is 35 years old and has blonde hair.
Plus, she wore a big 1980s-style wedding dress in the teaser that she was previously spotted in during filming, which fans at the time pointed out the outfit isn't accurate to the time period.
Since the teaser dropped, fans of the book have continued to criticise the film and aren't impressed with the sexual content, calling it "Visually pretty but entirely hollow & wrong," and "Fifty Shades of Heathcliff and Cathy".
(It has previously been reported that the opening scene of the film includes a public hanging where a “condemned man ejaculates mid-execution” causing an “orgiastic frenzy”, and a nun to “fondle the corpse’s visible erection”).
One person wrote, "Not to be that one friend who is too woke, but bleaching the class and racial otherness out of Wuthering Heights to sell a horny whitewashed romance genuinely p***es me off."
"Visually pretty but entirely hollow & wrong. This has nothing to do with Wuthering Heights, looks more like a bodice ripper / Bridgerton adaptation. idk what Fennell was thinking with this project; it’s truly horrendous & insulting to the source material. Just ew," a second person said.
"I wish I did not live to see the day Wuthering Heights, a beautiful gothic novel about the cycle of generational trauma with themes of race, class, religion, mental illness, abuse, etc., was adapted into a whitewashed dark romance booktok bodice ripper with a hyperpop soundtrack," a third person posted.
A fourth person shared, "The way this didn't need to be a Wuthering Heights adaptation, like girl if you wanted to make a horny period piece then do that. no need to terrorise Emily Brontë."
"Emily Brontë is rising from her grave as we speak because why did they turn Wuthering Heights into Fifty Shades of Heathcliff and Cathy," someone else reacted.
Another person responded: "Should be called '(things that did not happen in) Wuthering Heights.'
"Just noticed the quotation marks around Wuthering Heights…. They about to f*** this movie up," one user posted.
Charli XCX's song 'Everything is Romantic' remix featuring Caroline Polachek played in the teaser, and it was announced that the pop star has made original songs for the film, and this news has been equally divisive on social media.
One person said, "Wuthering Heights, starring Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi, featuring Charli XCX on the soundtrack, is kinda the matcha dubai chocolate labubu of film."
"This string of words has never been spoken before," a third person wrote.
"Them putting Charli XCX over the Wuthering Heights trailer."
We'll have to wait and see if their minds are changed when Wuthering Heights is released on Valentine's Day next year.
Elsewhere, The Twilight Saga is coming back to cinemas - what you need to know, and The Odyssey ticket resale shows the chokehold Nolan has on cinema.
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