Pauline Schultze.
Pauline Schultze, senior strategy manager, Mamamia.
Confession: I haven’t seen the 2026 adaptation of Wuthering Heights.
And yet, I already have a take. So does my group chat. So does half my feed. I know the casting debates. I have opinions on the press tour wardrobe. I’ve watched strangers dissect red carpet glances like forensic evidence.
That’s the point.
Before opening weekend, the film had cultural equity, not just awareness. And that signals something bigger than hype. It points to a structural shift in how cultural demand is built today.
Once, theatrical releases were powered by broadcast weight. Own the skyline. Own the ad breaks. Repeat until audiences felt like they must be missing out. Scale and repetition were the currency.
Today, demand is socially incubated. And the engine driving it is parasocial.
Under Emerald Fennell, who instinctively understands spectacle, the Wuthering Heights marketing was never built for universal love. It was built for social discourse.
The title itself helped. Wuthering Heights has always resisted moral neatness. Heathcliff and Catherine are obsessive, unstable, impossible to categorise. The friction was baked in. But the PR strategy didn’t soften that tension. It operationalised it.
Casting choices and modern reinterpretation were left to spark debate rather than be neutralised. Press appearances were staggered and stylised, creating ‘episodic drops’ rather than a single promotional burst. Wardrobe became commentary. Interviews became subtext.
This wasn’t accidental virality. It was structured intrigue. The stars became narrative infrastructure. When audiences are emotionally invested in the people behind the characters, the promotion becomes part of the entertainment itself.
Crucially, the strategy understood a simple truth of the attention economy: the most valuable story isn’t the one everyone agrees on. It’s the one people feel compelled to process together.
When a film becomes a discourse engine, the audience’s role changes. They don’t just watch. They metabolise. They speculate. They co-create meaning in comment sections and group chats.
We saw this play out during the Wuthering Heights press junket. Mamamia covered the tour with more than 70 social posts via entertainment brand The Spill, generating a combined organic reach of 8 million accounts and an average engagement rate of 4.3%, which far exceeds the industry benchmark of 0.3%.
Today’s audiences don’t passively scroll entertainment news; they interrogate it. They want guides who feel like trusted friends who help them to make sense of the moment with clarity, empathy, and humour.
That’s the opportunity for media brands placed to respond. Not just to report what’s trending, but to step into the moment and shape how it’s understood.
By shifting from standard casting announcements to “chemistry forensics,” Mamamia turned a conventional film rollout into a high-velocity cultural moment—publishing 17 targeted deep dives into the Elordi/Robbie PR playbook and surrounding casting controversies. One post alone, analyzing the “cuteness” of the film’s co-stars, generated nearly 380k organic engagements.
The result isn't borrowed relevance, but embedded participation. This is parasocial power at scale, proving trust moves culture faster than repetition ever did.
The success of Wuthering Heights 2026 tells us something beyond box office returns. Cultural impact is no longer built purely through media weight. It grows through social friction, controlled revelation, and personalities audiences feel emotionally invested in.
For marketers, that changes the brief. For studios, it reshapes the rollout. For media brands, it rewrites the rules of value.
In a parasocial economy, the real currency is relevance at speed, and it belongs to the brands already in the room when the conversation begins.
The question is, is your brand working with a media partner who has the agility and permission to start, not just surround, cultural conversations?
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Wuthering Heights didn’t market a film. It engineered a conversation.
By fuelling casting debates, drip-feeding press tour moments, and turning its stars into ongoing narrative characters, the campaign used social discourse as the strategy, not just the outcome.
In a parasocial economy, cultural demand is built through friction, proximity and trust, not just media weight.
For brands, the shift is clear: don’t just buy reach around the moment. Partner with platforms that can step into the conversation while it’s unfolding and shape it.