As reported yesterday, “Wuthering Heights” filmmaker Emerald Fennell, star Margot Robbie, and backer MRC passed on a $150M offer from Netflix and took Warner Bros.’ significantly lower offer. Fennell/Robbie were adamant in giving their film a robust theatrical rollout. How much did they leave on the table by snubbing Netflix?
It turns out that the Warner Bros deal was in the $80M range, according to Puck’s Matt Belloni, plus a back end, which it includes a wide theatrical release and a big marketing commitment. It’s probably a bummer for MRC execs, who were “salivating at the risk-free Netflix cash.” This means that Fennell/Robbie left more than $70M on the table, all for the sake of theatrical.
Belloni says that Fennell/Robbie have decided to “play the long game” by taking less now in the hopes that ‘Wuthering Heights’ becomes a commercial and critical success, not to mention Warners potentially getting Fennell’s and Robbie’s future projects. This is a risky decision from Fennell who wrote and directed “Promising Young Woman” and “Saltburn.”
Will the gamble work out? It’s hard to say. We don’t even know if Fennell’s version of “Wuthering Heights,” which stars Robbie and Jacob Elordi, is set in the present day, or maintains the novel’s 17th Century English setting. One thing is for certain, the level of interest for it sparked a bidding war amongst many studios which could hint at a strong script.