Paul Greengrass' medieval epic has made $6.4 million domestically against a reported $20 million budget, and its screen count just collapsed by nearly 90 percent.
Two weeks was all it took. The Uprising, Paul Greengrass' historical action film starring Andrew Garfield, has gone from 2,068 theaters to just 223, according to figures reported by Collider. Domestically, the film has made $6.4 million so far. Against a reported $20 million budget, that's not a number anyone at the studio wanted to see this soon.
Part of the problem was the marketing. Trailers and posters leaned hard into a Robin Hood connection without ever naming the character on screen. The film only pays that off in a stinger at the very end, borrowing the imagery without committing to the identity until the credits roll. Audiences walked in expecting one thing and got something considerably more ambiguous about what movie they'd actually paid for.
And it isn't the first time a studio has hedged its bets this way. Christopher Nolan pulled a similar trick with a Robin at the close of The Dark Knight Rises, though that was a different character entirely, one that's barely made it to the big screen otherwise. Robin Hood himself has had a rough run as a piece of intellectual property lately, and The Uprising doesn't buck the trend.
A crowded, unlucky lineage
Earlier this year, The Death of Robin Hood, with Hugh Jackman under Michael Sarnoski's direction, closed out at around $10 million worldwide on a $20 million budget. Go back to 2018 and Taron Egerton's Robin Hood, co-starring Jamie Foxx, managed roughly $85 million globally against a reported $100 million spend. Even Ridley Scott's 2010 version with Russell Crowe, built on a $237 million budget meant to chase the Gladiator high, only just cleared $321 million worldwide, a soft result for something that expensive.
The Uprising has now fallen short of all of them on the domestic side, and its Rotten Tomatoes score has settled at 55%. The site's consensus credits Greengrass' handheld, documentary-style approach for tapping into real anger about wealth inequality, but flags the mixing of recorded history with folk myth as clumsy rather than illuminating. That's a fair read of a film that spent its entire release cycle unsure of what to call itself.
Where does Garfield go from here? Reportedly, he's lined up to play Sam Altman in Artificial, a project already drawing attention for how it handles its real-life subject. Whether that film fares better than a medieval epic that couldn't say its own villain's name out loud is a separate question, and one that will play out in a very different kind of theater.
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