Angel Studios is already writing a 'Young Washington' sequel called '1776'

Angel Studios did not wait for the final weekend tallies before ordering more. Over the July 4 weekend, Jon Erwin, who wrote and directed Young Washington, stood outside Mount Vernon and confirmed that a sequel is underway. It is called 1776, and it moves the story off the colonial frontier and into the Revolutionary War.

"We have just begun writing another Revolutionary War epic on the year 1776," Erwin said in a video posted to Instagram. "If you think Washington is big, wait for 1776. It's epic in every way."

The reason for the confidence is the opening. Young Washington took in about $20.8 million over the holiday weekend, well past the roughly $15 million the trades had it tracking for. That is the biggest live-action opening in Angel Studios' history and its second-biggest overall, behind only last December's animated David and its $22 million start. For the weekend it finished third, behind Minions & Monsters ($36.4 million) and Toy Story 5 ($31 million), and ahead of Supergirl and Steven Spielberg's Disclosure Day.

None of that timing was luck. A George Washington origin story opened on the country's 250th birthday weekend, and the audience Angel built its business on turned out for it. The film drew an A on CinemaScore and a 93% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes. Angel says 47% of the opening crowd was 55 or older, most of the money came from the middle of the country and the South, and its single best-performing location was a megaplex in Utah.

The movie itself is not a marble statue. It follows Washington (William Franklyn-Miller) as a young surveyor turned officer who helps bumble the colonies into the French and Indian War and spends most of the runtime losing. The cast around him is deeper than the budget would suggest, with Ben Kingsley, Mary-Louise Parker, Andy Serkis, and Kelsey Grammer. Erwin has said what drew him in was the failure, not the founding-father varnish.

Whether 1776 can hold that is the open question. Young Washington works partly because its subject is small, a young man losing his way toward something before the wig and the dollar bill. The Revolutionary War is the reverse problem. Everyone knows how it ends, and staging it costs real money. Erwin is promising bigger battles and more scale, which is a cheap thing to say on opening weekend and an expensive thing to deliver. Working in his favor: Angel now has a formula that lands and a release slot it clearly understands. Announcing the sequel this fast is a confidence play, and this time the numbers earn it.

There is no release window for 1776 yet. Erwin says the script is being written now.