Beauty & the Beast should only further degrade such assessments. The draw was not Emma Watson, it was a very popular, highly acclaimed cartoon. Just as the Potter series of films had a built-in book audience. Emma Watson's job, like all leading actors, is to entice people to watch the films, and she can barely get cast, and has never been successful at that job. She is known for nine films, all of which were adaptations of enormously successful works with international fame & sales.

I don't know much about her acting either, having only seen her as a child (I missed the last 5 HP films), seen her giving a speech which was awful in its delivery, especially for a professional enterainer, who has been doing this over half her life, and utterly blowing a slam-dunk role in B&tB. The children who played Mowgli & Aurora gave much better performances in similar roles, and the latter's departed considerably from all source material, so she didn't have as a guide, a cartoon most people have seen many times. Watson's role was the least original, with the strongest inclination to acceptance, and she did it the worst of the young stars of the live-action Disney remakes.