Can Jacob Elordi Save Us From Illiteracy?

As a certified book to movie adaptation hater, I never expect a movie to get it right. I am still mad about the ending of Veronica Roth’s Divergent trilogy and don’t even get me started on Christopher Paolini’s Eragon. Whether it is leaving out major themes or plot points, adding new story lines that don’t exist, or reducing complex characters to caricatures of themselves, Hollywood crushes the hearts of book lovers everywhere each time a new version of a book is released. This feels especially true when they base the film on a beloved classic because it’s usually the 6th or 7th remake of a story that they just can’t get quite right; enter the recent controversy of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights versus Emerald Fennel’s 2026 adaptation. 

Despite this movie being only one of dozens of book-to-film adaptations released in the past year, the discourse around Emerald Fennel’s version of Wuthering Heights accuses the production team (and, subsequently, viewers who enjoy the movie) of promoting anti-intellectualism by the film misrepresenting certain facets of the book. Since we know that a book-to-movie adaptation can never be 100% true to its source material (even you, Lord of the Rings trilogy), why is this most recent version of Wuthering Heights so controversial? Personally, I think it is because we are all tired of Hollywood missing the point. As every sitcom parent has intimated at one point or another: we aren’t mad, Emerald Fennel, we’re just disappointed.

In the 100 years after the first adaptation of Wuthering Heights premiered as a silent film in 1920, Hollywood is still cutting the same corners. In every English language production of Wuthering Heights, only one (the 1992 film) has included the story that comes after Catherine’s death, which is the entire second half of the book. Somehow script writers haven’t figured out how to include the second generation of Earnshaws, Lintons, and Heathcliffs into the story that would expose Heathcliff as the abusive, vengeful old man he becomes after Catherine’s death. For example, I would say kidnapping your ex-lover/foster sibling’s daughter and forcing her to marry your son isn’t what I would call a romantic gesture. Or is it? It’s complicated.

Additionally, one of the biggest arguments made against the 2026 adaptation is casting a white man to play Heathcliff, who is described by Brontë as an ethnically ambiguous, non-white character. In the broad history of Wuthering Heights remakes, only one has ever hired a non-white actor for the role, which is the 2011 version directed by Andrea Arnold. In Arnold’s production, she placed the casting call for Heathcliff to be played specifically by someone of mixed race, which is how James Howson, a black actor, landed the role. 

While I do think that the conversation around Heathcliff’s race is important to a story like Wuthering Heights that focuses so much on oppression and classism, Emerald Fennel has added another twist to her story. Yes, Heathcliff is played by a white man (Jacob Elordi), but other characters are portrayed by non-white actors, such as the lady’s maid Nelly Dean (played by Vietnamese American actress, Hong Chau) and Edgar Linton (played by British Pakistani actor, Shazad Latif). Rather than ignoring the conversations around race in Wuthering Heights passively, it seems like Fennel made the strategic decision to remove the discussion of race as oppression from her movie entirely by picking non-white actors for leading roles. In a movie where race doesn’t matter, can we expect Heathcliff’s character to be discriminated against because of his race? This isn’t to say that the character wasn’t whitewashed in the 2026 movie and all its predecessors, but this version feels more “color blind” than ignorant (although color blindness has its own history of ignorance that we don’t have time to get into).

Where my opinion differs from the conversations and critiques around the 2026 adaptation of Wuthering Heights is the claim that the lack of book accuracy is encouraging anti-intellectualism. I agree that the reduction of Emily Brontë’s complex gothic novel to a “bodice-ripper” is nails on a chalkboard to my brain (see paragraphs above), but if mainstream media is covering 19th century literature and discourse, could that ever be constituted as anti-intellectual? In a recent article from The Guardian, book sales of Wuthering Heights tell a different story. 

Penguin Classics UK, the book’s publisher, reported that, in January 2026, 10,670 copies were sold compared to 1,875 in January 2025, a 469% increase and a trend that was consistent with a 132% increase in sales after the first teaser trailer in September of 2025. In the same article, the publishing director of Penguins Classic UK stated, “I can’t remember the last time a film adaptation generated this much excitement for the book.” These numbers can be compared to another recent adaptation of a gothic novel: Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein (2025). In Netflix’s 2025 article about book to movie adaptations, they indicated that, according to Penguin Random House, “The week following the release of the film on Netflix, there was a 180% spike in sales of the movie tie-in edition of the novel Frankenstein by Mary Shelley.” 

Given that literacy scores for high school students in the United States are at an all-time low since 1992 according to an assessment by the National Assessment of Educational Progress, any conversations surrounding books and 19th century literature on social media platforms feels like a step in the right direction. Even if readers hate the source material because it is nothing like Emerald Fennel’s version of the material (I can’t wait until readers find out that Catherine and Heathcliff never have sex in the book), it still gets people reading. 

Not only is Wuthering Heights being introduced to new readers through Emerald Fennel’s new movie adaptation, but the viral, and controversial, discourse surrounding the film is fanning the flames hotter than the questionable romance between Victor Frankenstein’s sister-in-law and The Creature in del Toro’s Frankenstein adaptation. Despite the inaccuracies present in the latest adaptation of Wuthering Heights, the variations of the retellings are keeping Emily Brontë’s words alive. As an avid fan of all the Brontë sisters since I first read their name in Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight, I will continue engaging in each retelling of Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre, hopeful that one day someone will get it right.