Updated Feb. 14, 2026, 9:50 a.m. ET
Spoiler alert! We’re discussing major details about the ending of “Wuthering Heights” (in theaters now). Stop reading now if you haven’t seen it yet and don’t want to know.
If you just saw Emerald Fennell’s kinky, candy-colored take on “Wuthering Heights,” you only got half the story.
Clocking in at just over 400 pages, Emily Brontë’s original novel is a decades-spanning epic charting the tempestuous romance between Catherine (Margot Robbie) and Heathcliff (Jacob Elordi), and how the next generation of children heals from passed-down trauma.
But the couple’s descendants don’t appear in Fennell’s “Wuthering Heights.” In fact, the movie ends roughly midway through Brontë’s book with Catherine’s death.
“It’s such a dense, complicated piece of work,” Fennell says. Adapting it was always “going to be really difficult. I had to kill a lot of my own darlings in order to make the story work in two hours.”
Here’s how Fennell changed the story’s ending – and whether the door remains open for a potential sequel:
How does the ‘Wuthering Heights’ 2026 movie end?
In Brontë’s novel, Catherine dies hours after her daughter, Cathy, is born prematurely. Cathy is raised by her father, Edgar, and goes on to marry Heathcliff’s sickly son, Linton, who dies shortly after their wedding.
Meanwhile, Cathy has a contentious relationship with her cousin, Hareton, who was taken in by the abusive Heathcliff after his parents’ deaths. Heathcliff taught Hareton his brutal ways, but through his unlikely courtship of the widowed Cathy, Hareton aspires to be better and stands up to the wicked Heathcliff. The young couple ultimately plans to get married, and Heathcliff – haunted by visions of Catherine – dies.
In Fennell’s movie, the infant Cathy is never born. The film ends with Catherine suffering from sepsis and having an apparent miscarriage, bleeding out in her bed. Heathcliff arrives too late to say goodbye, and tearfully cradles her dead body as a montage of their passionate romance flashes across the screen.
Will there be a ‘Wuthering Heights’ sequel?
Given that Catherine never gives birth in the film, Fennell nixes the possibility of exploring the next generation in a second movie.
“I think of this as a one-off, and I’m not alone in that when you look at other adaptations,” Fennell says. A 1992 film starring Ralph Fiennes and Juliette Binoche dared to adapt the entire book, although most “Wuthering Heights” movies only cover the first half, including the 1939 classic with Laurence Olivier and Merle Oberon.
“There’s a world where this is a miniseries and you really get into deep, deep detail of every single thing that happens,” Fennell says. “But for me, the thing I connected to as a reader was always (Catherine and Heathcliff). I also don’t know if I’d be very good at sequels!”
