This Controversial Fantasy Movie Is Still One of Emma Watson’s Biggest Hits Outside of Harry Potter

Videos by ComicBook.com

But there’s an argument to be made that Emma Watson is the biggest star of the three. She hasn’t starred in many projects post-Potter, but most of them have been fantastic. Then there’s one that was nothing short of extremely divisive, far more than stuff like The Bling Ring. That would be Darren Aronofsky’s Noah.

What Made Noah Such a Lightning Rod of Controversy?

First off, Noah ranks fairly high in terms of her 11 movies outside the Wizarding World. It’s below My Week with Marilyn, The Perks of Being a Wallflower, and Little Women, is on par with The Tale of Despereaux, The Bling Ring, This Is the End, and Beauty of the Beast, and above Colonia, Regression, and The Circle. It’s far from a bad movie, but it wasn’t what a lot of people in the audience were looking for.

Specifically, as soon as rock monsters pop up in the first act there was little chance that far-righters who wanted a Noah’s Ark movie straight out of the text were going to stick around until act three. It also, bafflingly, caught flack for its environmentalist slant, as if that’s some great crime.

Plenty of Christians were fine with it taking some liberties with the text. For instance, Noah’s (Russell Crowe) wife, played by Jennifer Connelly, is named Naameh. Technically, Noah’s wife isn’t named in the Bible, but the movie is right in that Naameh tends to be the name most frequently attributed her. A bigger departure is Ray Winstone’s character, Tubal-cain. In the movie, he’s basically just the villainous anti-Noah, whereas in the text he was the first blacksmith and, more importantly, the brother of Naamah. There’s no mention of the relation in the movie.

For those who aren’t looking for Bible Movie: The Movie, though, Noah isn’t hard to appreciate. Its tone is pretty out there, but at least it’s different. As Watson herself said of the film while it was in production, it’s supposed to be a movie where you can’t even place it in a specific time period. It could be an ancient, undeveloped world or a post-apocalyptic barren wasteland, you don’t know.

Noah is so far from the source material that Paramount even added a disclaimer to its marketing, informing potential ticket buyers that it was inspired by the story, but artistic license had been taken. Would it have been as big a hit as The Passion of the Christ had it been a word for word adaptation (not that that’s really what The Passion was)? Hard to say, but that would have been mighty hard considering it only goes from Genesis 6 through Genesis 9. You would have a 45-minute movie on your hands.

It worked out for Watson and Aronofsky, as Noah is both one of her highest-grossing non-Potter movies and flat out is his highest grossing movie. At $359.2 million worldwide (against a budget of at most $160 million), it beat his other big hit, Black Swan, by $29 million. That said, considering Black Swan‘s budget was a paltry $13 million, that will always be his most profitable film. As for Watson’s filmography, it was above Little Women‘s (still her most recent film) outstanding $220 million, but below the monster hit that was Beauty and the Beast.

Did you see Noah in theaters? What is your favorite Aronofsky film? Leave a comment below and join the conversation now in the ComicBook Forum!