Last fall, writer-director Seth Worley’s debut feature “Sketch” premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival to a warm welcome.
A charming, family-friendly comedy about a little girl who has just lost her mother and whose somewhat disturbing doodles spring to life and menace her small town, “Sketch” was well-reviewed out of the festival (RogerEbert.com’s review praised the way it “examines all the ways grief can manifest intensely”) but found itself in a frustrating place too many independent features find themselves in — without a distributor.
“It seemed that everyone loved the movie, but nobody knew how to sell it,” Worley told TheWrap.
Months went by and then an unlikely savior emerged. At their CinemaCon presentation in Las Vegas this spring, Angel Studios, the company behind grassroots phenomenon “Sound of Freedom,” announced that it had acquired “Sketch” and would be giving it a prime summer release date. The studio, looking to shed its exclusively “faith-based” label, had a movie that would help it expand. And “Sketch” would finally see the light of day.
TheWrap spoke with Worley and Angel Studios about the road to release, and the filmmaker was candid about his initial apprehension when Angel said it wanted the film.
“Angel Studios is not where I expected the movie to end up. It’s not where I necessarily wanted the movie to end up for a long time, but throughout the process of trying to get the movie sold, they were the ones hammering on the door, enthusiastically begging for a conversation,” Worley said.
Angel wanted “Sketch” precisely because it wasn’t like its other films.
“What we’re so excited about with this film is there’s a broadening,” Jared Geesey, chief distribution officer at Angel Studios, told TheWrap.
There are no overriding religious themes in “Sketch” and nothing, like the case with “Sound of Freedom,” that could be co-opted by certain groups and made political.
Geesey described “Sketch” as being a movie that “amplifies light,” which he said is Angel Studios’ “mission.”
To be an Angel release, “Sketch” had to pass through a couple of hoops, including the unusual crowdsourced “Angel Guild” that offers feedback on movies and whose approval is required for an Angel Studios film to be released. But for Worley, those hurdles were minor compared to the journey he’d already been on to just get the film off the ground.
Early setbacks
Worley, making his directorial debut, wasn’t exactly surprised that the road to “Sketch’s” theatrical release became so bumpy. He and Tony Hale, who plays the recently widowed father of the two young kids in “Sketch,” spent eight years trying to get the movie made. Repeatedly, they were told that this type of movie – a live-action family film – just isn’t the draw that it once was. The movies that he was inspired by, like the early Steven Spielberg-adjacent Amblin movies, are a thing of the past.
“They don’t make live-action movies like that anymore,” Worley said. (Coincidentally, Dana Goldberg, co-chair of Paramount Pictures, told reporters on Wednesday that she was specifically looking to bring back the “four-quandrant family film,” name-checking “Goonies” and “Night at the Museum.”)
He and Hale realized that “something happened where if we saw a live-action movie being marketed to both us and our kids, our assumption was immediately, Oh that’s probably just for kids, or, It’s for stupider adults. And that sucked.”
When Worley was writing the movie, his kids were younger, and he’d show them the movies that he grew up watching. “But all the modern movies that we were watching together and both finding value in were animated,” Worley said, citing Pixar movies, “The Lego Movie” and “The Mitchells vs. the Machines.” “It was a bummer that there weren’t any live-action family movies that were coming out that didn’t feel like I was tolerating it as a parent while my kids enjoyed it. And I want to derive value from it as much as from ‘Spider-Verse.’”
Worley said that this conversation continued when they were trying to sell the movie.
At one point early on, they screen-tested the film in Anaheim. The audience was mostly teenagers aged 13 to 18. “They all rated the movie 9 or 10 – in terms of what they thought of the movie. It was off the charts. Almost all of them loved it,” Worley remembered. But when the research group asked the teens if they would recommend it to a friend, the numbers were “bottom of the barrel,” according to Worley.
“They all wrote some form of, ‘I don’t think my friends would like it.’ And I was like, This is a snapshot of the teenage brain,” Worley said. “The fact that you all loved the same thing but you’re terrified that your friends won’t like it.”
Teens, to Worley’s understanding, are drawn to things that they probably shouldn’t see – “Deadpool” and “Squid Game” and the like. ”They want to experience things that they feel like they’re not supposed to,” he said.
Internally, the movie was described as “Inside Out” (since it hinges on the power of imagination) meets “Jurassic Park” (because there are some awesome monsters and some scary moments). “Sketch,” Worley said, “has scary moments, but it’s led with a comedy engine and is made to be accessible to both parents and kids.” But that might have also been the problem. “In trying to appeal to literally every human alive, you end up creating a movie that’s hard to decide how to market. And it is an original IP, not based on anything. All of those things made it really hard for people to commit and to wrap their brain around.”
The filmmaker admitted that he had given up on “Sketch” many times over the years. The defeat that seized him after TIFF was not new.
“When I put it in a drawer, Tony would open it back up and be like, ‘What if we tried this?’” Worley remembered. There were countless iterations of the project, including a TV show version. Production companies and financiers came and went. After Worley had relocated to Nashville in 2022, a friend there asked if he could look to secure financing. “A week later, he’s like, ‘I found money for it.’ They were shooting a month later,” Worley said. “I gave up as many times as possible but I surrounded myself with people who believed in it.”
And some of those people who believed in it ended up being the ones at Angel Studios.
Heaven sent
Worley admitted that he came to the Angel Studios conversation with “a lot of doubts and fears, because they were primarily known for faith-based projects and projects that may lean politically in a direction that I don’t.” The filmmaker had been working on the project for almost a decade. He was hesitant to hand “Sketch” over to anybody, much less Angel Studios.
Quickly, they proved themselves to Worley. According to him, they said, “We like this because it’s not like our other movies. We want to start releasing stuff that is not like our other stuff.” To their credit, “the movie got to stay as weird as it was when it premiered at TIFF, thankfully, and it got to stay as totally complex as it is.”
While Worley stressed that it is pretty much the same movie that premiered in Toronto, there are some differences – there is a call-to-action in the credits (part of Angel Studios’ “clever and smart marketing campaign” according to Worley), he had to cut out any “Oh my Gods” (“I was able to do them seamlessly”). After those edits were made, the movie was approved. There is now a card at the beginning of the movie that states that it was approved by the Angel Guild.
The Angel Guild, one of the more unique aspects of the studio, is comprised of more than 1 million members (you can sign up online). The film is sent to thousands of these members and they rate whether they want it to be an Angel release or not. “That’s as nerve-wracking as you’d expect for a filmmaker,” Worley said. Most of the members who commented liked the movie. Some had issues with cursing or some other aspects, but then members who enjoyed the movie would fight with those who were unhappy with things. “I am going to print a coffee table book of all the comments because there’s some very funny stuff,” Worley joked.
But without the approval of the Angel Guild, Angel Studios would never have released “Sketch.”
Angel’s Jared Geesey said, “We had 1,300 films submitted last year that were voted on by the members of the Angel Guild. I can’t distribute anything unless it’s first approved through that voting process.”
Angelically yours
According to Geesey, filmmakers don’t really get notes directly from Angel Studios. It’s the Angel Guild that guides the conversation. He describes it to directors as “our green-light mechanism, but it’s really a post-production and audience feedback mechanism.” If a film doesn’t pass muster with the Angel Guild, the filmmakers (who are given a dashboard with all the feedback and comments) are given the opportunity to make changes and resubmit. A new group of Angel Guild members will then review the new version of the movie.
“We have films that we produce that didn’t pass at all, and had to get edited and resubmitted six, seven times before we found a cut that would pass,” Geesey said. “That’s a very normal part of our process.”
When it came to “Sketch,” Geesey said, it was an “imaginative, beautiful film” that also gave Angel Studios an opportunity to expand their audience.
“People might assume, because of the success of the very overt faith titles that we’ve done, that stories that amplify light is limited to faith messages, and it isn’t. Stories that amplify light are excellent entertainment that is true, honest, noble, just authentic, lovely — these are the kinds of words that our guild members are looking for,” Geesey said. “We’re not afraid of faith. The majority of humanity is having some sort of faith experience, and so we just think it’s normal for that to be reflected in the stories that we’re telling. But it’s not something that’s pigeonholing us. The guild is saying this kind of story that we see in ‘Sketch’ is broad and does amplify light.”
Geesey confirmed that “instances of taking the Lord’s name in vain” is one of the hard lines for Angel Studios, hence their deletion from “Sketch.” The other is nudity. While Angel Studios bristles as the designation that they are a faith-based company, with only a small sliver of their output openly religious, these guidelines wouldn’t be found in more secular studios.
Angel Studios was drawn to “Sketch” because it appreciated the story and the fact that so few movies like it were produced nowadays. “I think there’s a gap in the market for these kinds of family-fun movies,” Geesey said.
As for the next mountain that Angel Studios wants to climb, after “Zero A.D.,” a drama released for Christmas, they have a romantic comedy starring Kevin James that will be out for Valentine’s Day 2026 — as long as the Angel Guild approves.
“Sketch” just hit some 2000 screens and has grossed a little over $5 million domestically in its first week in release, but it nabbed an A- CinemaScore from opening weekend audiences — a seal of wide moviegoer approval outside the Angel Guild system.
The ambition to get this film out on thousands of screens is what charmed Worley and made him excited about partnering with the studio. “We did the premiere in L.A. last week and it was nuts. We had giant inflatables of the monster and a life-size school bus and they rented out three or four theaters and filled it with fans,” Worley said. “It was amazing to see so much effort and energy put towards this movie that was an independently made, original idea. Especially in this climate in the industry.”
Some might call it miraculous.
