Hugh Jackman’s Divisive Action Thriller Is Officially HBO Max’s No. 1 Movie

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    Image via A24</figure>

The Death of Robin Hood‘s opening scene quickly reveals that it won’t be your traditional Robin Hood story. Jackman’s take on the archer is less of a swashbuckling outlaw, sporting a massive beard and a ragged cloak. People seek him out not for adoration but for revenge, as he’s killed countless scores of their family members. And in the most shocking moment within the opening sequence, Robin kills a young girl and buries her in the forest. Such brutality peppers the movie’s first half, and explains its mixed reception. While the title indicated that the movie wouldn’t shy away from dark matters, some probably weren’t expecting it to be this dark.

What grounds The Death of Robin Hood is Jackman’s performance. He portrays Robin Hood as someone coming to terms with his past, for better or worse. That’s reflected in his conversations with Sister Brigid, especially when he learns that he killed her parents back in his youth; his confession to her is utterly heartbreaking. Yet the ending also solidifies the legend of Robin Hood, as the archer tells an embellished tale of his exploits to the daughter of his oldest friend, Little John. Michael Sarnoski told CinemaBlend in an interview that this ending was meant to show how stories can shape people for the better.

“The story he tells is the original Robin/Little John story that, in his mind, he kind of knows is not true. But he realizes that there’s something that can be used from that to sort of help this little girl understand her father and understand her world, so she’s not traumatized by what she’s experienced.”

“The story he tells is the original Robin/Little John story that, in his mind, he kind of knows is not true. But he realizes that there’s something that can be used from that to sort of help this little girl understand her father and understand her world, so she’s not traumatized by what she’s experienced.”

Four action series. One of them is built around exactly the way you
handle pressure, people, and a room that has just gone very quiet. Here is where you would survive
the trilogy, and probably headline it.

You are precision with a grudge. You don’t posture, you don’t
escalate, and you don’t warn anybody twice. That is exactly why the people who know you are
so careful never to be the reason you start.

• The Wick films run on discipline: an underworld with actual etiquette, a hero who
  honours every rule of it, and a world that unravels the instant someone breaks one
  against him.
• You share that quality. You are extraordinarily reasonable right up to the line, and
  then completely immovable past it.
• Focus, commitment and sheer will. You’d be the one carrying grief through three sequels
  and turning it into technique rather than noise.
• People wouldn’t call you dangerous. They’d say your name quietly and let that do the
  work.

You understand the thing the whole franchise is secretly about:
the cars are spectacular, but the crew is the point. You collect people, you keep them, and
you’d drive through a building for any one of them.

• This series went from street racing to orbit without ever changing its actual subject,
  because loyalty scales and plot doesn’t have to.
• You have the same instinct. You build a family out of whoever turns up, and then you
  defend it past the point of reason.
• You’d thrive here because the franchise rewards exactly your strengths: warmth, nerve,
  an absolute refusal to leave anyone behind, and a relaxed relationship with physics.
• The mission can wait. The barbecue cannot.

You over-prepare and then take the dangerous part yourself
anyway. It looks like control, but it’s really responsibility. You have never worked out how
to ask somebody else to carry the risk.

• This is the franchise of the plan that collapses on schedule: the team, the mask, the
  rooftop, and the one person sprinting flat out because sprinting is all that’s left.
• You share that refusal to accept an outcome. Told the odds, you treat them as an
  administrative error.
• You’d thrive here because these films reward competence and loyalty in equal measure.
  The mission matters, but nobody on the team gets left on the wrong side of a door.
• Some people delegate the cliff. You have never once been that person.

You are not the most trained person in the building, the best
equipped, or the one anybody would have picked. You are simply the one still standing at the
end, which turns out to be the only qualification that matters.

• Die Hard invented the modern action hero by making him mortal: outgunned, out-planned,
  bleeding, and extremely funny about it.
• You share that stubbornness. Adversity doesn’t make you noble, it makes you sarcastic,
  and then it makes you unstoppable.
• You’d thrive here because these films reward improvisation and nerve over preparation,
  and you’ve never had the luxury of preparing anyway.
• You didn’t want any of this. You just declined to be the person who let it happen.

The Success of ‘The Death of Robin Hood’ Proves A24 and HBO Max Have The Perfect Partnership

The Death of Robin Hood is the latest A24 movie to make a splash on HBO Max, thanks to a partnership that puts A24 films on the streaming service after their theatrical run. The partnership has paid off in more ways than one: a platform like HBO Max lets A24’s movies stay in the conversation long after their theatrical runs, and HBO Max gets some of the year’s buzziest movies. Previous A24 movies that rocketed up HBO Max’s charts include Olivia Wilde‘s razor-sharp dramedy The Invite and the horror hit Backrooms, and more are on the way as Primetime will eventually hit the streamers after it leaves theaters.

The Death of Robin Hood might not be the same smash hit as Logan, but it still let Hugh Jackmanput his own signature touch on another legendary figure. Its streaming success also proves that sometimes a movie has to wait to find its audience, and it looks like that time is finally here.

The Death of Robin Hood

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  Hugh Jackman

  Robin Hood

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  Jodie Comer

  Sister Brigid

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  Bill Skarsgård

  Little John

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  Faith Delaney

  Little Margaret