Why Robin Hood Just Flopped So Hard

3. The Marketing And Failure To Hit The Key Demographic

The marketing for Robin Hood started poorly, it's fair to say. The first details released heavily pushed the revisionist Guy Ritchie-like approach to the source material and then images started to appear that showed off a more modern Robin cosplaying as an Assassin's Creed character. That wasn't so bad, though it was terribly obvious, but it was the release of the first image of Mendelson's villain that caused the first real issue.

That image seemed to suggest his henchman - all decked out like the MCU's Crossbones - were going to be carrying actual guns. Sure, they might shoot arrows, but they looked unmistakably like guns. If this was the revisionism they were aiming for, it wasn't looking good.

The first trailer then came along and wowed precisely nobody: the hints of Ritchie influence were too much, the cribbing from elsewhere too obvious and the arrogant allusions to this being a story nobody had heard before (when in reality it's just one nobody really WANTS to hear again) were particularly off-putting.

The reality is that Robin Hood would have made an awful lot more money if it had gone balls out on the demographic that matters most to it: the Call Of Duty and Assassin's Creed video game fans who will take the most from Bathurst's direction. Everything about the movie's execution makes it feel like they were the targets: as if the film-makers had sat down and created a mood-board of the defining aspects of those two franchises - bad writing that thinks it's great; one-dimensional, cliched characters; no women anywhere; action sequences literally set in multiplayer map arenas; ridiculous weapons that are made up bastardisations of real weapons - and run with them all.

Had they been honest and just told everyone they were making THAT movie, they might have dialled into the Call Of Duty clans more successfully and they might have lent their considerable heft to the box office.