Jacob Elordi's Post-Apocalyptic Film Offers Respite From Wuthering Heights & Euphoria Backlash

Along with his Euphoria co-stars Zendaya and Sydney Sweeney, Jacob Elordi has quickly shot to the top of Hollywood’s new A-list. The traditional star is quickly becoming a thing of the past, but Elordi and Sweeney and Zendaya and Timothée Chalamet and Florence Pugh are all clinging to the title of bona fide “movie star.”

Elordi, in particular, has done a great job of balancing commercial hits like The Kissing Booth trilogy with arthouse fare like Sofia Coppola’s Priscilla. He earned an Oscar nomination for his sympathetic portrayal of the monster in Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein. Actors rarely have any control over their career path, but Elordi has cultivated a pretty strong filmography. They haven’t all worked (Saltburn and On Swift Horses were both largely panned by critics), but Elordi is making all the right professional moves.

But we’re a third of the way into 2026, and he’s not having a great year so far. Elordi has starred in two of the biggest, buzziest, most talked-about projects of the year — Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights and Euphoria season 3 — but they’re both being talked about for all the wrong reasons. Wuthering Heights was a smash hit at the box office, and Euphoria season 3 has scored massive viewing figures for HBO, but neither has really landed with their intended audience.

Still, all hope is not lost. Elordi has yet another high-profile project coming out in 2026 — Ridley Scott’s post-apocalyptic thriller The Dog Stars, set to hit theaters on August 28 — and it’s the perfect antidote to the back-to-back disappointment of Euphoria and Wuthering Heights.

The Dog Stars Is Wildly Different To Jacob Elordi's Most Famous Roles

On the surface, Wuthering Heights and Euphoria might seem like very different projects. Wuthering Heights is a movie based on a book; Euphoria is a TV show based on another TV show. Wuthering Heights is a period piece; Euphoria is contemporary. But Emerald Fennell and Euphoria creator Sam Levinson are very similar in their approach to storytelling. Above all, they want to create a visceral response in their audience. Whether that means grossout gags or gratuitous sex scenes, their main objective as artists is shock value.

I didn’t notice the similarities between Fennell and Levinson’s styles until I saw them put Jacob Elordi in the exact same scenario back-to-back. In Wuthering Heights, Elordi’s Heathcliff forced his wife Isabella to enact a puppy play fantasy, and in Euphoria, Elordi’s Nate Jacobs caught his fiancée shooting OnlyFans content in a dog costume, and proceeded to enact a puppy play fantasy. Elordi went from telling Isabella to “stay” on the Wuthering Heights set to telling Cassie she’d been a “bad, bad dog” on the Euphoria set.

The Dog Stars will be a complete 180 from the shock value of Elordi’s other 2026 projects. Based on Peter Heller’s novel of the same name, The Dog Stars casts Elordi as a civilian pilot living in a world where disease has wiped out most of humanity. Based on The Dog Stars’ trailer, it looks like it’s Ridley Scott’s version of The Last of Us, which is a mouth-watering proposition. There’s still a dog involved — he has a canine companion, much like Mad Max — but, hopefully, there won’t be any puppy play.

Why Wuthering Heights & Euphoria Season 3 Didn't Land With Audiences

The backlash to Wuthering Heights and Euphoria season 3 can be boiled down to one simple problem: they don’t do what they say on the tin. Wuthering Heights claims to be an adaptation of Emily Brontë’s classic novel, but it takes some wild liberties with the source material, to the point that it might as well be called something else.

Euphoria has the exact same issue; it doesn’t feel like Euphoria anymore. We’ve left behind the high school setting and all the chaotic drama that came with it; everyone is acting absurdly against character (especially Elordi’s Nate, who seems to be on autopilot this season); and it just seems like Levinson wanted to make an edgy neo-western crime thriller about loan sharks and drug smuggling, and then crammed the Euphoria characters in there to fulfill his contractual obligations to HBO.