Moviegoers don’t have to wait until Sept. 10 to storm the gates of London.
Focus Features, Sawhorse Productions and Genesis Studios launched “Enter the Revolt” this week, a free custom Fortnite experience built around Paul Greengrass’s upcoming movie THE UPRISING, letting players fight the same medieval rebellion Andrew Garfield brings to theaters next week.
“That’s what THE UPRISING’s about. How do we free ourselves from an oppressive society and a set of systems and structures that doesn’t want us free?” Garfield told Esquire, months before that same question turned into a video game fans could answer for themselves.
Built with Epic Games’ Unreal Editor for Fortnite, the free mode pits two five-player teams against each other as Rebels and Kingsmen. Rebels push a battering ram through four escalating map phases, moving from muddy farmland to London’s fortified walls, while Kingsmen fight to hold the line before time runs out. Players wield period-appropriate bows and melee weapons, earn in-match currency, and upgrade their health, speed and damage as the fight wears on.
Winning or losing even changes how the story ends. Each outcome unlocks its own movie-inspired cinematic, giving players a small, personal stake in a story most of them haven’t watched unfold on the big screen yet.
Related: The Uprising | Interview with Andrew Garfield, Paul Greengrass, and Thomasin McKenzie
It’s a savvy bit of marketing, and hardly a surprising one. Fortnite counts more than 650 million registered accounts and 110 million monthly active users, among the largest audiences in gaming, and studios increasingly treat the platform as a pre-release billboard that families actually visit on purpose. Rather than a trailer people scroll past, THE UPRISING gets a version of itself that kids and teens can walk straight into.
That’s worth a moment of parental awareness, not alarm. The game trades the movie’s grimmer historical realities for cartoonish, bloodless combat, the same treatment Fortnite gives every licensed crossover from Star Wars to Marvel. But the source material carries real weight: THE UPRISING dramatizes the English Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, when a farmer-led army marched on a 14-year-old King Richard II demanding an end to crushing taxes and abuse of the poor, a rebellion historians count among the inspirations behind the Robin Hood legend.
Movieguide® has watched this pattern grow all year, as studios chase teenagers and tweens who spend more time inside game worlds than in front of trailers. A movie tie-in that lives inside Fortnite reaches a kid who has never set foot in a theater, which cuts both ways for families. It’s a real opportunity to spark a conversation about justice, tyranny, and who gets to decide what’s fair, the same questions Garfield says drove him to the role. It’s also a reminder that a free download can carry a studio’s whole marketing pitch straight into a living room without a parent ever seeing a rating or a trailer first.
Players who want to try it themselves can search the code 6068-8825-6932 inside Fortnite’s discovery menu, free of charge, no purchase or theater ticket required.
Greengrass, an Academy Award-nominated director known for UNITED 93 and CAPTAIN PHILLIPS, wrote and directed THE UPRISING, producing alongside Jason Blum, Gregory Goodman, Joanna Kaye, Joe Neurauter and Lars Sylvest. Oscar nominee Andrew Garfield leads a cast that includes Jamie Bell, Stephen Dillane, Tom Hollander, Cosmo Jarvis, Thomasin McKenzie, Jonny Lee Miller, Woody Norman, Katherine Waterston and Sky Yang.
Families curious whether the finished movie earns a spot on their watch list won’t have to wait long. Focus Features releases THE UPRISING in theaters nationwide Sept. 10, and Movieguide® will publish a full review closer to opening weekend.
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