20th Century Fox was originally set to distribute the film, but it was shelved when the studio was bought by Disney. Alejandro Monteverde was so eager to release the film in some capacity that he spoke to his attorney about possibly releasing it to watch on YouTube before it was picked up by Angel Studios.
Against the producers' wishes, Tim Ballard personally insisted that Jim Caviezel play him in the film because he had been impressed with Caviezel's performance as Edmond Dantes in The Count of Monte Cristo (2002).
Podcaster Lila Rose interviewed Eduardo Verástegui ("Paul" or "Pablo" in the film), who mentioned that the children who acted in the film were not told the plot or context of the scenes they were in. This was to prevent any unnecessary trauma as they acted out the scenes. This is also contrary to public media opinions, which often blamed the movie for unnecessarily traumatizing children in its production.
At the end of the opening credits, presumably in theaters, Jim Caviezel delivers a "special message" to the theater audience, about how the kids in the story are the real heroes, and how the cast and crew believed in the movie so much that they hurdled various barriers to get into theaters (referencing the five-year gap between the film being finished and being released). At the end he urged moviegoers to pull out their phones and use the website on the screen to buy tickets for other people, urging that financial constraints should not limit people from seeing the movie. This highly risky marketing tactic in combination with podcast appearances by Caviezel and Tim Ballard seemingly worked; according to "Variety," after three weeks in theaters it became the first indie film to surpass $100M at the box office in the post-pandemic era. The message is missing in the on-demand movie version.
The movie was finished in 2018 but took years to release; the filmmakers were turned down by various distributing companies as they didn't want the film associated with their output.