Andrew Garfield's The Uprising Rushed To Digital After Flop

Paul Greengrass' The Uprising pulled out of nearly all its US theatres within two weeks before Focus Features rushed it onto rental and purchase platforms.

Seventeen days. That's how long Focus Features gave Paul Greengrass' The Uprising in American cinemas before shipping it to digital rental and purchase, according to Collider. The film opened in more than 2,000 US theatres in September and is down to roughly 220 now, having pulled in only around $6.5 million domestically.

That's a rough number for a Greengrass picture with Andrew Garfield in the lead, and it comes on top of a marketing campaign that couldn't decide what the film actually was.

For a stretch, The Uprising was being sold as a Robin Hood story. It isn't, not officially. The film never names itself as an adaptation, though Collider notes it does lean into the legend in its closing stretch. Jamie Bell, Cosmo Jarvis, Thomasin McKenzie and Jonny Lee Miller round out the cast.

Critically, it's landed in the middle of the pack. Rotten Tomatoes has it at 56 percent, with the site's consensus reading that Greengrass' "cinéma vérité-styled medieval epic draws most of its potency from the evergreen rage of wealth inequality, but its mingling of history and myth proves more awkward than enlightening." Collider's own headline flags a separate audience score of 65 percent, which would put ticket-buyers somewhat ahead of critics on this one, though the publication doesn't break down where that figure comes from beyond the aggregator.

Universal, the studio behind Focus Features, has spent the last couple of years talking up longer theatrical windows for its films. The Uprising didn't get one. Seventeen days and out is about as fast as these things go for a wide release, and it puts this somewhere between Jason Bourne, which Greengrass made for Universal in 2016 and which made money despite so-so reviews, and Green Zone, his 2010 Iraq War thriller that flopped on both fronts. The Uprising looks closer to that second camp. Bloody Sunday, his breakout, went the other way entirely: raves, no audience.

There's also the small matter of the Robin Hood curse. Since 2010, at least three big films built around the character have struggled at the box office, Ridley Scott's Russell Crowe version, the Taron Egerton reboot and a Hugh Jackman-led character study among them. An MGM+ series last year broke the pattern, for what it's worth.

On the digital side, early numbers look better. FlixPatrol has The Uprising sitting at number two on the domestic iTunes chart, just behind Coyote vs. Acme, and it's also charting on Amazon, where The End of Oak Street currently holds the top spot.

The film still has a UK theatrical release coming later this month, which means its real box-office story isn't finished yet. Whether British audiences respond differently to a film American theatres more or less gave up on in a fortnight is the next thing worth watching.