A 9/10 review couldn't save Andrew Garfield's new movie from the emptiest theaters of his career
On paper, this should have worked. Andrew Garfield, a man who has suffered beautifully on camera for two decades, leading the Peasants' Revolt of 1381 for Paul Greengrass, the guy who made shaky-cam a love language. R-rated. Swords. Righteous class fury. September counter-programming.
In practice, The Uprising opened to $3.2 million from 2,068 theaters. That is not a number. That is an apology.
The receipts, and they are grim
It gets funnier-slash-sadder in context: this is the second time in three weeks a Garfield movie has posted a career-worst debut, after The Magic Faraway Tree face-planted with $1.3 million in August. Two historic lows in one month is no longer bad luck; that's a genre. The autopsy, in bullet form:
- 51% from critics on Rotten Tomatoes, a B- CinemaScore, and a shrug of a marketing campaign that reportedly sold it as a secret Robin Hood origin story — which it is not
- opening weekend went head-to-head with the NFL's season kickoff, i.e., the one weekend American men are legally required to stay home
- the budget is rumored at $20–30 million, and Focus paid $11 million just for distribution rights, so nobody's buying a boat off this one.
And yet: the 9/10 of it all
Here's the part that breaks my brain. The people who did like this movie really liked it. ScreenRant's critic handed it a 9/10, writing that "Greengrass acquaints himself well with the period setting." Audiences scored it a full 13 points above critics. And Greengrass himself pitched the story with the most 2026 sentence a 72-year-old British director has ever produced, telling UPI the Peasants' Revolt is really about
"wealthy oligarchs who protect their wealth and privileges."
Sir, you cannot make the most relevant film of the year and release it opposite the Cowboys game.
The final indignity is statistical: because Garfield's post-Spidey leading roles kept going limited-release or straight to Netflix, this flop is technically his biggest wide opening as a leading man since Hacksaw Ridge in 2016. His career low and his decade high are the same number. Somewhere, a studio analyst is lying down.
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Garfield described his Ploughman's arc as feeling "almost like a death and a rebirth," and honestly, same energy for his box office. The rebirth part arrives soon enough: he plays Sam Altman for Luca Guadagnino in Artificial later this year. From leading starving peasants against their god-king to playing an AI CEO — the man simply refuses to stop being on the nose.
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