Wuthering Heights box office: Did all that hype pay off in ticket sales?

On Friday night at Dendy cinemas in the inner-west Sydney suburb of Newtown, the heaving crowd had overpacked the lobby.

People were everywhere, lining up for tickets and snacks, snaking their way to their seats, and excited energy was in the air. Groups of women were gearing themselves up for Wuthering Heights.

Just before 9pm, one session of the Emerald Fennell-directed movie had just streamed out, and some of the audience still had tear-stained faces, trying to subtly wipe away the evidence of their emotional reactions.

One woman said she wasn’t sure what had come over her, but that she loved the film, and judging by the squeals and delighted outbursts at various times heartthrob Jacob Elordi showed up on screen from the packed cinema, she recounted, she clearly wasn’t the only one.

To say that Wuthering Heights has been one of the most anticipated releases of the past 12 months is not an exaggeration. Among women, many of them young, the promised sweeping romance of Emily Bronte’s Cathy and Heathcliff had been teased for months.

But despite the feverish conversations around the film, it didn’t light the box office on fire, performing more or less on par with expectations and tracking.

According to Deadline, Wuthering Heights’ Australian box office came in at $6.07 million, and accounted for around 70 per cent of local ticket sales this weekend.

Margot Robbie and Elordi both hail from Queensland, and the promotional tour ended in Australia with a splashy premiere at Sydney’s State Theatre while the stars surprised fans at regular screenings in Sydney and Brisbane.

In the most important market, North America, Wuthering Heights’ opening weekend was $US34.8 million, and is expected to hit $US40 million by the end of the long weekend in the US, taking in the Monday Presidents Day public holiday.

Outside of the US and Canada, the movie took in $US42 million. The strongest territory was the UK, where the film was made and set, opening to $US10.3 million. It also hit number one in countries including Brazil, Mexico, Singapore, Germany and Spain. It has yet to open in Japan and China.

Wuthering Heights’ box office is being closely watched, more so than other high profile releases because the production team, including director and writer Fennell and producer Robbie, through her banner LuckyChap, turned down a $US150 million payday from Netflix.

They accepted a much lower $US80 million offer from Warner Bros because the pair insisted the film have a wide, global cinema release, which Netflix refused. Industry watchers, especially against the backdrop of the now-pending acquisition of Warners by Netflix, are waiting to see if Fennell and Robbie’s gamble will pay off.

Traditional studio deals have profit-sharing incentives baked in, while Netflix generally paid one flat fee upfront no matter how well a project ultimately does or doesn’t do.

The Wuthering Heights team then went on an aggressive marketing and publicity push to “eventise” the film. The studio spent, according to Deadline, around $US100 million on marketing, advertising and publicity. It’s not unusual for the marketing budget to exceed the production costs of a big release.

With cinema chains keeping around half the price of ticket sales, Wuthering Heights would need to earn between $US360 million to $US440 million to break even.

Given that the audience for the film is largely considered to be “front-loaded”, meaning that an activated audience rushed to see it on opening weekend, it may to have to rely on repeat viewers to clear that hurdle.

Some of its costs would be recouped through the myriad cross-promotional commercial deals it has signed, including partnerships with Airbnb (which has set up a replica of Cathy’s bedroom in Yorkshire), acai chain Oakberry, Cheetos and Doritos, accessories brand Aspinall of London, US department store Bloomingdales and biscuit business Last Crumb.

The at-expectations box office reflects the mixed reactions to the film, ranging from euphoric highs to shattering lows, both among critics and audiences. It has a 62 per cent on Rotten Tomatoes and a 52 per cent on Metacritic. The user-generated IMDB rating is 6.4/10.

In contrast to some of those seduced audiences streaming out of Dendy Newtown on Friday night, the top-rated Wuthering Heights review on Letterboxd, a social media app for movie lovers, read “Emily Bronte died of tuberculosis 177 years ago yet this adaptation is the still the worst thing that has ever happened to her”. It has 29,372 likes.

The next two were equally scathing. “I’m gonna jump from a wuthering height”, said one, while the other read, “Emerald Fennell is to film what Colleen Hoover is to literature”, referencing the American author of It Ends With Us, who has been accused of romanticising toxic relationships.

In the US, CinemaScore is a company that exit-polls moviegoers about their sentiment. Wuthering Heights scored a B, which is fine but not amazing. It generated only a 51 per cent “would recommend”.

It found in the US that 76 per cent of the audience were women, and most of them went with friends rather than romantic partners (the latter accounted for only 22 per cent). It also skewed younger with almost two-thirds of the audience falling in the 18 to 34 age group.