Why Robin Hood Just Flopped So Hard

8. It's Weirdly Out Of Date

Word of mouth is inevitably a big thing with any potential blockbuster and as well as the critical issues with Robin Hood, it has another problem stopping its word of mouth factor: it feels completely out of date.

That's not to say that it's historically inappropriate (because Game Of Thrones, Vikings and Peaky Blinders prove there's intrigue in historically-focused properties), but it's the creative choices and the allegorical parallels that don't quite work in 2018. A few years ago, yes, but not now.

There's a very brief allusion to Trump's America and Brexit Britain in the Sheriff of Nottingham's politics of fear, but it's dumped pretty quickly and the lasting parallels are to the Arab Spring, a brand of Islamophobia that feels tied closely to the Afghan and Iraqi conflicts (which aren't over, of course, but which had their cultural moment in film already) and, weirdly, to Banksy. He might still be in the news, but reimagining Robin Hood as a sort of Banksy of history who inspires followers to nail hoods everywhere is both weird and dated.

The same goes for some of the stylistic choices too: Bathurst's action direction has real moments of flair (the CGI in the horse and carriage chase aside), but it also owes a lot to the direction Guy Ritchie put into Sherlock Holmes and the way Christopher Nolan shot Batman Begins. In that respect, it feels like it's living in the near-past and heavily cribbing from far superior sources, which is not a good look for it.