Focus Features Rebranded Garfield’s Movie as Robin Hood Then Erased It Overnight

Hugh Jackman's Robin Hood movie earned less than seven million dollars this summer.

Two weeks before release, Focus Features quietly changed everything about Andrew Garfield's new movie.

Twenty-four hours later, the studio made a decision that explains exactly how panicked they are.

A Historical Epic Nobody Could Explain

The Uprising was supposed to be a serious, gritty period film about the English Peasants' Revolt of 1381.

Paul Greengrass – the director behind the Jason Bourne franchise and Captain Phillips – wrote and directed it.

Garfield's character was listed as "the Ploughman," a common farmer who rises to lead a rebellion against the young King Richard II.

The film skipped the fall festival circuit entirely – no Venice, no TIFF.

That was the first sign something wasn't tracking.

Then on August 20, the movie's social accounts posted new footage with a tagline nobody had seen before: "Witness the Rise of Robin Hood."

A new title followed almost immediately: The Uprising: Rise of Robin Hood.

A full day hadn't even passed before Focus Features pulled the Robin Hood branding out of its newest trailer and reverted to the plain The Uprising.

The UK distributor, Entertainment Film Distributors, went further and flatly denied any Robin Hood connection existed at all.

Two distributors, one movie, two contradictory identities, and a title that didn't last twenty-four hours.

Hollywood's Robin Hood Problem Is Very Real

Jackman's The Death of Robin Hood should have been a slam dunk.

A-list star, $20 million budget, the director of A Quiet Place: Day One behind the camera, co-starring Jodie Comer.

It opened in June against Toy Story 5, pulled in just $2.86 million opening weekend, and finished its entire theatrical run with $6.9 million worldwide.

Critics gave it 66% on Rotten Tomatoes – barely fresh.

Audiences delivered 56% – rotten.

It was on digital streaming within six weeks.

The lesson Hollywood should have learned: audiences don't have a Robin Hood problem, they have a grim, humorless, revisionist Robin Hood problem.

Nobody wants to watch their childhood hero turned into a brooding war criminal meditating on violence.

The version people remember – Errol Flynn swinging through Sherwood Forest, Kevin Costner with a dubious British accent, even the goofy Mel Brooks version in Robin Hood: Men in Tights – those worked because Robin Hood was fun.

Hollywood keeps forgetting that.

A Title Change That Couldn't Survive One Day

That June disaster apparently taught Focus Features the wrong lesson.

Two months later, the studio decided the fix for its own marketing problem was to call its movie a Robin Hood movie too.

That's not a strategy.

That's a studio guessing in public.

Walking it back within a day confirms it – Focus Features didn't stand behind the rebrand long enough to see if audiences even noticed.

The historical mismatch is real, too.

Robin Hood's legend usually belongs to the 1190s, under Richard the Lionheart and King John.

The Uprising takes place under King Richard II in 1381.

That's nearly 200 years apart.

The studio's defense leans on a technicality: written Robin Hood ballads didn't surface until the 1400s, and a Ploughman character appears a century earlier in William Langland's poem Piers Plowman – the earliest known literary seed of the legend.

Garfield's character – also called the Ploughman – is apparently meant to evoke that connection.

It's a fairly academic argument to hang a marketing pivot on, especially one the studio itself abandoned within a day.

Deadline first reported this project back in 2022 under the title The Hood, so the Robin Hood angle isn't new invention – it's baked into the film's history.

Since then it's been The Rage, then The Uprising, then briefly The Uprising: Rise of Robin Hood, then back to The Uprising again – four titles in four years, with the last flip lasting less than a day.

Nobody at Focus Features has explained why.

Audiences have been trained to smell desperation, and right now The Uprising reeks of it.

Greengrass is a serious filmmaker with genuine credits – the man made United 93 and Bloody Sunday.

This film may very well be excellent.

But Focus Features just burned whatever prestige positioning it had left, flip-flopping on the title of its own movie in under a day, in full public view, while its UK partner openly contradicted it.

If the tracking numbers were good, none of this would have happened.

Opening weekend will tell the rest of the story.

Sources:

• Jordan Moreau, "Is Andrew Garfield Playing Robin Hood? 'The Uprising' Marketing Sparks Confusion," The Wrap, August 27, 2026.
• "'The Uprising' Drops 'Robin Hood' Title After Chaotic 24 Hours," World of Reel, August 26, 2026.
• "The Uprising Robin Hood Rebrand: What's Going On," tbreak.com, August 28, 2026.
• Tim Lammers, "'The Death of Robin Hood' Arrives on Streaming This Week," Forbes, July 27, 2026.
• "'The Death Of Robin Hood' Bombs: Hugh Jackman Movie Ends Run With Less Than $7 Million," Cosmic Book News, August 2026.
• Brennan Klein, "Hugh Jackman's New R-Rated Thriller Earns His Lowest Box Office Debut in 5 Years," Screen Rant, June 20, 2026.