The Annenberg Inclusion Initiative report for 2025 showed that of the top 100 films at the box office, only nine were directed by women. In the 19 years that the study has been conducted, only three women had directed three or more films to be represented on that list: Anne Fletcher, Lana Wachowski, and Greta Gerwig.
You can now add one more woman to that list: Emerald Fennell.
Fennell’s “Wuthering Heights” this weekend opened to $88.5 million over the four-day weekend ($82 million in three days), all against a production budget of $80 million (before marketing costs). It’s not exactly a record-breaker, as it’s behind the domestic opening for plenty of other female-directed films, and it’s #14 in terms of 4-day openings over Presidents’ Day weekend. It even opened a little soft compared to some projections, which originally had “Wuthering Heights” reaching $40 million or even $50 million domestic before the weekend. It is however still a boon for Warner Bros., which now has had nine straight movies open to #1 dating back to last year (suddenly a lot is riding on Maggie Gyllenhaal’s “The Bride!”).
But between her debut “Promising Young Woman” ($18.8 million) and “Saltburn” ($21 million), Fennell now has three movies that will crack the Top 100 on that Annenberg Inclusion Initiative report in a year, and it puts her in the conversation among some of the other top-performing female directors at the box office of all time.
“Wuthering Heights” opened above the openings for last year’s “Freakier Friday” from Nisha Ganatra ($149.2 million cumulative) and Emma Tammi’s “Five Nights at Freddy’s 2” ($238.1 million cumulative) and it has already in four days surpassed the overall gross of Nia DaCosta’s “28 Days Later: The Bone Temple” ($56.8 million) and Chloé Zhao’s “Hamnet” ($79.4 million). We just wrote about how well that one has done internationally, so Warner Bros. has a lot to be excited about.
Fennell has a ways to go before she reaches the Gerwig tier, which is technically a tier of one. Gerwig’s “Barbie” grossed $1.4 billion for Warner Bros., but even Gerwig’s film “Little Women,” another romantic period drama based on classic literature, grossed $220 million worldwide. “Wuthering Heights” could easily get into that ballpark.
“Wuthering Heights” very likely could’ve gone the Netflix route, accepting a higher budget in exchange for being a streaming-only release, but the film landed at Warner Bros. because Fennell wanted theatrical, and that gambit seems to have paid off. It may have done very well on Netflix and had an even bigger reach, but we wouldn’t be talking about Fennell’s ability to produce box office hits.
Instead, it adds another feather to the cap of Warner Bros. entrusting filmmakers with a vision to go big and do what they want (“Wuthering Heights” is a very big film), it shows that Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi could be considered movie stars capable of opening a film, and it will surely give Fennell another bite at the apple for whatever she wants to make as her fourth feature.
Let’s hope she pushes again for another theatrical release for that one.