Gavin O’Connor’s The Accountant brought Ben Affleck in a different kind of action role. The film ended its run with a worldwide total of $155 million and a sequel was announced, but struggled to gain traction. The Accountant starred Ben Affleck as Christian Wolff, a mathematical savant with more affinity for numbers than people. Behind the cover of a small-town CPA office, he works as a freelance accountant for some of the world’s most dangerous criminal organizations. The film sported an impressive cast that included Jon Bernthal, John Lithgow, J.K. Simmons, Anna Kendrick and Jeffrey Tambor.
Industry insider Daniel Richtman has confirmed that The Accountant 2 is now a go with Amazon producing the film. Gavin O’Connor will return to direct with Ben Affleck reprising his role. Back in 2021, O’Connor appeared on the CinemaBlend podcast where he revealed that he had just closed the deal for the sequel. He stated, “We literally just closed that deal. We’re doing The Accountant again…I’ve always wanted to do three because what, the second one’s going to be more with — we’re going to integrate his brother into the story. So there’ll be more screen time for [Jon] Bernthal in the second one. And then the third movie’s going to be, I call it, ‘Rain Man on steroids.’ The third movie is going to be the two brothers, this odd couple. The third one is going be a buddy picture.”
Affleck reunited with O’Connor for the basketball drama The Way Back in 2020. While the creative team was brainstorming what the sequel to The Accountant would entail, Affleck reveals it was also tossed around as a TV series. The Boston native said, “We’ve talked about it. There seems to be a debate whether or not to do a TV series version of it. The scriptwriter [Bill Dubuque] has become quite successful and busy, so he’s off doing his thing. And somebody said to me, ‘Well if we could find a script that we could retrofit and make into a sequel… But that’s sort of tricky because the personality of the character is so specific, that doesn’t really work to just say, ‘Well, we used call this script Action Movie Shootout, and now we’re going to call it The Accountant 2′.”