2/18/2014

Poll Says Christians Already Hate 'Noah' without Having Seen It


A few days ago, THR ran a piece about Darren Aronofsky's troubled production on Noah (we wrote about it here), the massive Biblical epic he's been developing with Warner Bros. The story basically recounted how the director and studio fought over the version of the film to be presented, and the efforts they went to in order to make those of faith comfortable with Aronofsky's interpretation of the familiar story.  The film, which reportedly cost north of $130M, has an uphill climb if religious groups refuse to turn out, and ridiculous polls like the one released by Faith Driven Consumer aren't going to help.

In their badly-worded, obviously biased poll, they report that 98% of Christians (out of 5000 supporters according to Washington Examiner) aren't satisfied with Hollywood even attempting a Biblical film, much less one that dares to have a message they may not agree with. Here's the rather terrible phrasing of the question...

 "As a Faith Driven Consumer, are you satisfied with a Biblically themed movie – designed to appeal to you – which replaces the Bible’s core message with one created by Hollywood?"

What I hate about this is that it has an obvious anti-Hollywood bias, as if everybody on the left coast are a bunch of godless heathens. That's the narrative a lot of these sites like to push (unless they're talking about their "heroes" like Chuck Norris or Ronald Reagan, then they LOVE Hollywood), and the implication that Noah has somehow ripped out the crux of the Bible's message feeds into that. Of course, nobody over at Faith Driven Consumer has seen the movie. Apparently they didn't read the THR article in full, either, otherwise they would have seen Aronofsky and the film's producers talking at length about their desire to be true to the story while filling in the many blanks with fresh material.

Of course, some other right-wing, faith-based sites have picked up on this story and are using it to claim that Christians will stay away from Noah in droves and perhaps go check out Son of God instead. Actually, it sounds more like these sites are encouraging people to do that. We'll see what happens, but if these folks are upset now about Hollywood making movies based on the Bible then it's going to be a rough couple of years.