Name: Young Washington
Director: Jon Erwin
Genre: History, Drama, War
Released: 2026-07-03T00:00:00+00:00
Duration: 125 min
Cast: William Franklyn-Miller, Ben Kingsley, Mary-Louise Parker, Kelsey Grammer, Andy Serkis

Before George Washington was a monument, he was a provincial soldier out of his depth. Young Washington drops its hero into the frontier war between Britain and France for control of the Ohio Valley, where a colonial militia officer with more ambition than seasoning is handed a command, an unreliable set of allies, and a chain of choices that will either make his name or bury it. The film is less a biography than a pressure test, a study of a man learning in real time what leadership actually costs.

That framing is also a business strategy. Angel Studios, the faith-and-family distributor that turned Sound of Freedom into a phenomenon, is pushing its largest live-action production into theaters over a national holiday, betting that a reverent origin story about the founder can pull the mainstream audience the major studios have mostly stopped chasing. Jon Erwin, directing solo, is the connective tissue: he built a career on inspirational hits that outran their budgets, and he is now scaling that instinct onto an epic war canvas.

The casting tells you what kind of film this wants to be. William Franklyn-Miller, young and largely untested at this scale, plays Washington as a work in progress rather than a finished icon, which is the whole point: he has not become anyone yet. Around him, Angel Studios spent on gravity. Ben Kingsley plays Virginia’s lieutenant governor Robert Dinwiddie, Andy Serkis the doomed British general Edward Braddock, Kelsey Grammer the landowner Lord Fairfax, and Mary-Louise Parker the mother whose expectations weigh on him. The veterans supply the authority the lead is meant to be growing into.

Erwin, working apart from his brother for the first time on a project this size, has spent his career in the inspirational lane, in music-driven dramas and faith-market crowd-pleasers such as I Can Only Imagine, American Underdog and Jesus Revolution that consistently overperformed their budgets. This one carries an added layer of ownership. It is the flagship release of Wonder Project, the faith-and-values studio Erwin launched with the producer Kelly Merryman Hoogstraten, with Angel Studios attached to distribute. So the director is not just making a movie, he is proving out a company. Young Washington becomes the test of whether that sensibility survives contact with a genuinely hard historical subject: muskets, ambushes, and a protagonist whose early service included a diplomatic disaster that helped ignite a world war.

The war itself is the engine. The French and Indian War, the North American theater of a global conflict, was where Washington’s reputation was first forged and very nearly destroyed, and the film leans into the ambiguity of a young officer whose miscalculations carried consequences far beyond his rank. His first independent command ended in a forced surrender at Fort Necessity, and not long after he survived the bloody rout of Braddock’s column on the Monongahela, the disaster that Serkis’s general marches straight into. Those are the beats a war picture can dramatize honestly or quietly launder, and the choice is close to the whole ballgame. Shot across Ireland and Virginia, the film trades the marble-statue version of the man for someone still capable of getting people killed through sheer inexperience.

What the film has to prove is whether reverence and honesty can share the frame. Angel Studios’ house style runs toward uplift, and a founding-father origin story is an easy place to sand off the hard edges: the Jumonville Glen affair, in which Washington’s role in the killing of a French envoy helped touch off the war, or the enslaved people who would later work his land. Early notices peg it as a sturdy, old-fashioned great-man biography, which is at once its selling point and its ceiling. A film this invested in making Washington admirable risks flattening the very inexperience that makes the premise worth watching.

William Franklyn-Miller as George Washington in Young Washington, 2026 — William Franklyn-Miller in *Young Washington* (2026)

The ensemble rounds out with Jonno Davies as the officer James Mackay, Mia Rodgers as Sally Cary, and Joel Smallbone, the for KING & COUNTRY musician who fits Angel Studios’ faith-audience calculus, as William Fairfax. Erwin directed from a script he co-wrote with Peter Stark, Tom Provost and Diederik Hoogstraten; Wonder Project, Provident Films and 2521 Entertainment produced alongside Angel Studios. The finished film runs a shade over two hours.

Young Washington premiered at the Tribeca Festival before its commercial run, and Angel Studios opens it wide across the United States on July 3, timed to the Independence Day weekend it was practically engineered for; industry projections put the opening in the twenty-to-thirty-five-million-dollar range. International rollouts follow on their own clocks, with the Netherlands in early July, Poland at the end of the month, and Spain waiting until late November, while other territories, including any Russian release, remain unannounced. Whether the bet pays off will be settled where Angel Studios’ releases always are: at the box office first, and in the culture second.