UPDATE: Andrew Garfield hopes billionaires are “scared sh-tless” by the movie, and X users are answering with his own paychecks.
Andrew Garfield’s peasant rebel is Robin Hood in The Uprising, and Focus Features waited until two weeks before release to say so.
The studio has attached a new tagline to Paul Greengrass’ The Uprising, “The Rise of Robin Hood,” rolling it out on X on August 20 with a 28-second spot and the caption: “To the rich, he was an outlaw. To the people, he was a hero. Witness the rise of Robin Hood in THE UPRISING, only in theaters September 11.”
The post has pulled in 1.7 million views, and the replies are full of people asking the same question: since when is this a Robin Hood movie?
Until last week, it wasn’t.
The project was shopped at the Cannes market in May 2025 under the title The Rage and sold as the story of the 1381 Peasants’ Revolt against King Richard II, with Cosmo Jarvis playing the real-life rebel leader Wat Tyler and Woody Norman as the 14-year-old king.
The July trailer never said the words Robin Hood.
Garfield’s character is credited on IMDb only as “Ploughman,” a widowed farmer who loses his family to the Black Death and picks up a scythe when the King’s men come back for more tax money to fund the war in France.
The synopsis on Focus’ website has been rewritten to match the new pitch.
Garfield “stars as the leader of a ferocious rebellion against the tyranny of King Richard II. Set against the true events of the Uprising that helped inspire the legend of Robin Hood, he forms an army of the people to face the King’s might in a fight for justice.”
The previous version promised “a birth of a legend” without naming which one.
Social media reaction has been rough.
“It’s a f—ing Robin Hood movie?!” one post asked, picking up more than 13,000 likes, per THR. Another user said the reveal bummed them out because they thought someone was finally making a movie about the Peasants’ Revolt, a period that never gets the epic treatment.
Others can’t square a real revolt and a real Wat Tyler with a fictional outlaw dropped into the middle of it.
As the legend is usually told, the history crowd has a point: nearly every Robin Hood movie puts him in the 1190s under Richard the Lionheart and Prince John, two centuries before Wat Tyler.
Greengrass is working from the other end of the record. The earliest surviving written mention of Robin Hood is in William Langland’s poem Piers Plowman, written just a few years before the revolt, and the 1381 rebels invoked Piers the Plowman in their own letters, which is almost certainly where Garfield’s “Ploughman” credit comes from.
Focus hasn’t explained why it sat on the Robin Hood angle through a Cannes launch, a trailer, and a poster, only to drop it in the final stretch.
THR reached out to the studio and got no response. Garfield’s own Esquire profile, published Tuesday after the reveal, doesn’t mention Robin Hood once.
The Second Robin Hood Movie Of 2026, And The First One Bombed
The name Focus just bolted onto its movie is the same one that flopped in June.
A24’s The Death of Robin Hood, with Hugh Jackman and Jodie Comer, finished its run with $6.9 million worldwide against a $20 million budget.
It opened to $2.86 million on June 19 in eighth place, fell 78.5% in its second weekend, and A24 had pulled it from nearly 1,500 theaters by the July 4th frame. Critics landed at a barely-Fresh 66% on Rotten Tomatoes and audiences came in at 56%.
Jackman coming off Deadpool & Wolverine and $1.3 billion couldn’t get anyone into a theater for Robin Hood. Two months later, Focus is betting the same name is what gets people in for Garfield.
Studios don’t add a famous name to a title in the last two weeks of a campaign because the campaign is going well. They do it when the title they have isn’t registering, and “The Uprising” is a generic noun that could describe any revolt in any century.
“Robin Hood” is a search term. “The Uprising” is not.
Warner Bros. Pulled The Same Move On Birds Of Prey
There’s a precedent, and it isn’t encouraging.
In February 2020, Birds of Prey (and the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn) opened to $33 million against projections in the $45 million-plus range, and within days Warner Bros. had theaters and ticketing sites relist it as Harley Quinn: Birds of Prey.
The studio’s stated reason was search: people looking for Harley Quinn couldn’t find the movie because her name was buried at the end of a parenthetical.
The new title didn’t save it. The Margot Robbie movie finished around $84 million domestic and $202 million worldwide on a budget reported in the $84 million range, a bomb by DC standards, and the retitle became the textbook example of a studio rebranding a movie in real time to stop the bleeding.
‘Robin Hood Didn’t Steal From The Rich,’ Say X Users
Then there’s the tagline. “To the rich, he was an outlaw. To the people, he was a hero” is a rich-versus-poor pitch, and the replies have spent a week correcting it.
“Robin Hood did not just ‘rob from the rich and give to the poor,’ he reclaimed the taxes that were unjustly levied on the people,” wrote one user. “This is just more commie slop.”
Another: “Um.. Robin Hood didn’t steal from the rich, he stole from the govt and returned it to the people.”
A third posted the meme that has been circulating for years: “Friendly reminder: Robin Hood didn’t rob from the rich to give to the poor. He robbed from the government and gave back to the tax victims.”
Those replies describe the movie better than the tagline does. The 1381 revolt was a tax revolt.
Richard II’s government imposed three poll taxes in four years, with the last hitting every adult over 15 to fund the war in France. When collectors came back to enforce it, the peasants marched on London.
Garfield told Esquire the film is about “brutal conditions for working-class people, brutal taxation post-plague, incompetence in government, abusive practices,” with the underclass treated as sub-human by those in power.
He also called the movie “a bit of a Rorschach Test,” predicting people across the political spectrum will see themselves in it. Asked whether the conditions of 1381 apply today, he said: “Yeah, here and in the United States, and all around the world.”
So Garfield is describing a movie about a government taxing its people into rebellion, while the studio is selling class war with a Robin Hood sticker on it.
History fans feel baited, and Robin Hood fans already skipped one this summer.
The Uprising opens September 11. Greengrass wrote and directed, Jason Blum produces through Blumhouse, and Jamie Bell, Stephen Dillane, Tom Hollander, Jonny Lee Miller, Thomasin McKenzie, Katherine Waterston, and Sky Yang round out the cast.
