Andrew Garfield’s The Uprising has sparked a bizarre marketing row after its US distributor suddenly presented the film as a Robin Hood origin story, only for the title to disappear a day later. The film, written and directed by Paul Greengrass, had previously been marketed as a fictionalised account of the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, when rebels challenged the rule of a young King Richard II over taxation, poverty, and the treatment of England’s poorer population. Garfield was described as an unnamed Ploughman, a fictional peasant who became a leader of the rebellion, while Cosmo Jarvis was said to play the real-life revolt leader Wat Tyler, and Jamie Bell a radical preacher called John Ball.However, new US promotional material released earlier this week called it The Uprising: The Rise of Robin Hood, and showed Garfield as a masked, green-clad figure wielding a bow and arrow, with the tagline telling viewers to “witness the rise of Robin Hood”.The next day, the film was back to being called The Uprising. Its UK distributor said the Robin Hood material hadn’t been approved and insisted the film was about the Peasants’ Revolt and “not Robin Hood”.“The Uprising is a historical epic about the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, not Robin Hood. The UK marketing campaign does not make any reference to Robin Hood,” it added. “Marketing materials posted by other countries that may appear in the UK online and on social media referencing Robin Hood are not issued or approved by us.”The distributor had shared a description of the film in July that read: “Andrew Garfield stars as the legendary leader of a ferocious rebellion against the tyranny of King Richard II. As war burns across England, he forms an army of the people to face the King’s might in a fight for justice and survival.”Andrew Garfield in The Uprising (Focus Features/YouTube)This has left the film with two strikingly different marketing campaigns on either side of the Atlantic. While the US film page of Focus Features is back to calling the film The Uprising, its synopsis still says the story is “set against the true events of the uprising that helped inspire the legend of Robin Hood”. Watch Apple TV+ free for 7 dayNew subscribers only. £9.99/mo. after free trial. Plan auto-renews until cancelled.Try for freeADVERTISEMENT. If you sign up to this service we will earn commission. This revenue helps to fund journalism across The Independent.According to IGN, updated production notes sent to American media still state that William Langland’s 14th-century poem Piers Plowman inspired Greengrass’s approach to Garfield’s character and “helped the filmmaker settle on his approach”. They also claim that the poem “gave birth to the legend of Robin Hoode”, describing it as “the ultimate British outlaw myth about a common man attempting to right great injustice and coming under threat from the authorities for his actions to serve the citizenry”.Piers Plowman contains the earliest surviving literary reference to Robin Hood. In a passage generally dated to the late 1370s, one character boasts that he knows the “rymes of Robyn Hood”. Although the name “Robehod” appears in earlier 13th-century records, the first surviving literary stories about the legendary figure date from later in the 15th century.The problem is that Robin Hood’s story is traditionally set around the reign of Richard the Lionheart and his brother King John, in the late 12th and early 13th centuries. The Peasants’ Revolt took place under Richard II some 200 years later. One user on X said they had “just lost all interest” after the Robin Hood reveal, adding that “a Wat Tyler movie would be great, don’t need another Robin Hood retread”.Another suggested that the UK distributor’s statement pointed towards a marketing decision rather than a genuine revelation about the film, speculating that Focus Features had decided “a Robin Hood angle would make it more appealing to Americans".“On the one hand it’s incredibly funny they’re trying to trick people into seeing this movie by pretending it’s a Robin Hood movie,” one person wrote, adding that they wished audiences had “enough intellectual curiosity to go see a film about a fascinating moment in English history”.At least one history-minded observer took issue with the new tagline itself, pointing out the awkward chronology. “The Robin Hood legend had been around for about two centuries before the 1381 Peasants’ Revolt,” they said. “Robin Hood had already risen! He rose! 200 years before this!”The uncertainty is made worse by the fact that Garfield’s character is never actually called Robin Hood in the film’s production material. He remains the “Ploughman” while Jarvis is identified as Wat Tyler, the historical leader of the revolt. In an Esquire profile of the actor, Garfield’s character in the movie is described “a fictional everyman farmer whose wife and children have died in the Black Death and, when the King’s men come looking for even more tax money to fund foreign wars, has nothing to lose by taking a stand”.The Independent has reached out to Focus Features for comment. Greengrass’s project has gone through several different identities since it was first announced. In 2022, the film was reported as The Hood, with Benedict Cumberbatch tipped to star. Subsequently, it was called The Rage, with Matthew McConaughey attached, before it became The Uprising and Garfield joined. The Uprising releases in US cinemas on 11 September and in the UK on 4 October.