In the latest Hollywood adaptation of “‘Wuthering Heights,’” Heathcliff and Catherine Earnshaw are tortured soulmates, the moors are wide and barren, everyone is brooding, and the story is reduced to sex, violence, and revenge. The critical points about class, racial otherness, inheritance, and generational destruction Emily Brontë made in her 1847 novel are pushed aside to create a gothic romance film for a date night.
Lately, Hollywood’s approach to classic literature feels less like reinterpretation and more like reduction. From “‘Wuthering Heights’” to “Frankenstein” to “Animal Farm,” film studios keep coming back to classic literature, and in theory, this should be a good thing. Adaptations can reintroduce older pieces of literature to new audiences and expand on the themes that remain prevalent in society today.
But this doesn’t always seem to work in practice. Hollywood’s problem is using the ethos of classic literature without doing the work of actually engaging with its content. Adaptations don’t need to transcribe the original text, but they do need to understand what the original source material is actually doing to faithfully interpret it. [...]
In recent adaptations, studios rely too much on the marketability of recognizable names, characters, and titles. Instead of considering why the book is important, producers often focus on the parts of the book that can sell the fastest, which is how a complicated, nuanced novel is reduced to a gothic romance with elaborate costumes.
Emerald Fennell’s “‘Wuthering Heights’” demonstrates how easily this flattening can happen. Fennell described how the novel captivated her when she was 14 years old and how she wanted her adaptation to capture the “primal and sexual” feelings she had when she first read it. But when an adaptation is based on a first impression instead of a deeper reading, it runs the risk of presenting an inaccurate version of the original text.
Devin Garofalo, a professor in UCSD’s literature department, explained in an interview with The Guardian that Brontë’s “Wuthering Heights” is not just a romance; it is about “the horror of romance.” Treating violence as passion due to a teenager’s misreading of a novel is what Brontë was critiquing in the first place. [...]
In other words, bad adaptations don’t just make audiences misunderstand a book — they can make audiences misunderstand history as a whole. They offer what Garofalo called an “amnesic account of the past”: one that airbrushes historical violence from a present-day vantage point and makes the past seem distant and decorative. Classic literature matters because, as Lu explained, the past is always “infiltrating the present.” These texts help readers understand the current world by showing how language can be manipulated, how class and race shape relationships, how violence gets justified, and how these old systems of power still shape the present. When Hollywood trims these texts down to their most marketable hook, it undermines the reason why these stories mattered in the first place.
Hollywood does this because these hooks are easier to sell and produce than a complicated, uncomfortable argument. Sex sells. Jacob Elordi sells. Topical references sell. But a serious critique of power, class, race, and gender? Those are often much harder to package and convince viewers to watch.
And that’s where the problem becomes bigger than just the adaptation. Lu described how adaptation debates often focus too much on whether a film is a good or bad rendition of the original source. But the better question, she argues, is: “What does it say about us that this is the adaptation?”
The answer is not flattering. These recent adaptations suggest that Hollywood thinks audiences want classics in their easiest, most comfortable versions: recognizable enough to market but not complicated or nuanced enough to encourage thought. They keep the title, the aesthetic, and the basic premise while watering down the harder ideas about power, class, race and violence that made these books important in the first place.
When Hollywood strips that away, it isn’t keeping the classics alive: It’s just turning them into marketable content. Brontë is probably rolling over in her grave — because if this is Hollywood’s idea of preserving literature, the classics were better off on the shelf. (Anu Venkatesh)
Hollywood is a byword for entertainment not teaching/learning. And when a film--however harmful you want to consider it--helps turn an 1847 novel into a bestseller in 2026 it is most definitely keeping a classic alive. Once again, if Emily Brontë is turning in her grave it must be due to the number of people claiming to know how she would react to something.
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