Ben Affleck and director Gavin O’Connor are set to reteam in thriller sequel The Accountant 2, which will reportedly start filming in the spring.
Don’t worry if you completely forgot about 2016 action thriller The Accountant – director Gavin O’Connor and star Ben Affleck haven’t. According to World Of Reel, the long-in-gestation sequel is set to go into production in March, with its release currently pencilled in for the following spring.
The last time we heard any news about The Accountant 2 was in September 2021 – back then, O’Connor was talking about the potential for turning the whole thing into a trilogy. It isn’t currently clear whether a third movie will happen, though O’Connor has previously said “I’ve always wanted to do three.”
The Accountant saw Affleck star as Christian Wolff, a maths genius on the autism spectrum whose skills included long-range weapons, hand-to-hand combat, and as the title suggested, highly accurate bookkeeping. Reviews at the time were mixed, but the film still did decent numbers at the box office – it made more than three times its lean $44m budget back, hence the talk of sequels.
In the years since the thriller’s release, O’Connor and Affleck have collaborated again on The Way Back, a well acted, low-key basketball drama that didn’t quite find the audience it deserved – largely because its release in March 2020 coincided with the global pandemic.
Amazon is producing their The Accountant sequel, which is also said to see the return of co-star Joe Bernthal as Affleck’s brother, while screenwriter Bill Dubuque – who wrote the first film – is also reported to have worked on the script.
The Accountant is but one entry in a growing subgenre of action thrillers with jobs in their titles. In a matter of days we’ll see Jason Statham play the title role in David Ayer’s The Beekeeper, while Aaron Eckhart stars as the titular manual labourer in Renny Harlin’s The Bricklayer, which sneaked into US cinemas on the 5th January.
There’s no official title for O’Connor’s sequel as yet, but we’d humbly suggest The Accountant 2: Back On The Books or The Accountant: Ledger Of Death.
