Following online discourse, my friends and I brought ourselves to our local AMC to watch Emerald Fennell’s “Wuthering Heights.” After picking out candy, grabbing popcorn and listening to Nicole Kidman promise that Brontë’s inevitable heartbreak would “feel good in a place like this,” we settled into our seats.
Unfortunately, the film didn’t live up to the sermon that preceded it — the one that insists we won’t merely be entertained but reborn. Deep down, I knew the marketing never promised transcendence, but spectacle. And yet, like so many other cinephiles, I felt compelled to go anyway.
The experience became a microcosm for what’s currently wrong with the industry; it caters towards a consumerist audience, one that prioritizes virality at the expense of originality, emotional truth, and cultural awareness — and we’re allowing it. As the credits rolled, that realization was the only heartbreak I left the theater with.
While discussing the movie on our way home, my friends and I overwhelmingly agreed that only the set design, wardrobe and cinematography were notable, certainly not the acting or the integrity of the story.
Because the movie failed to hold a candle to the themes in the novel, recycled the same popular actresses and actors and made unnecessary and irresponsible recharacterizations, the movie felt like doomscrolling. Fennel’s adaptation offered stimulation with absolutely no intellectual payoff, the same kind of empty content we scroll past to avoid thinking about the real world.
“Wuthering Heights” is not the only film that has disappointed audiences in this way. Even though films with casts that were 41–50% Black, Indigenous and people of color performed the best across several sales categories, many films have prioritized casting not just actors, but brands.
Whether this manifests through the ages, races or genders of actors casted, plot and technical accuracies are sacrificed for the sake of box office success.
Hollywood catered towards exactly this, they assumed their audience wanted to see impossibly beautiful stars, sexual shock value and escapism all packaged as cinema. When you apply the anti-intellectual “Netflix Original” formula — recognizable faces and brainless content — to classic stories like “Wuthering Heights” and other adaptations, you flatten them into something unrecognizable.
If prestigious institutions like the Oscars reward films like these then the message to young filmmakers becomes clear: don’t take risks, don’t make anything that challenges audiences, but instead cater towards what they want to see. This is how great cinema erodes — through a lowering of expectations.
In order to preserve the quality of cinema and to encourage younger generations to continue showing up to the theatre, several changes need to be made.
Actors, producers, directors and writers alike must stop endlessly circulating through the same actors to tell stories outside of their depth. They must create original content rather than recycling old stories that have already been adapted — and tastefully at that. They must understand that representation through storytelling and casting matter. And most importantly, they must understand that what stories they choose to tell shape the world far beyond the screen.
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