Ben Affleck has ridden some rocky blockbuster waves in recent years, but one film that was really an undeniable success arrived in the fall of 2016. Gavin O'Connor's The Accountant is one of the rare recent original action titles to actually perform really well at the box office, making $155.1 million globally on a $44 million budget. The performance was significant enough to immediately start some sequel chatter, and while we haven't heard much about the project in a minute, it's apparently a project that Affleck is still interested in pursuing.
It was last reported that The Accountant 2 was in the works with Gavin O'Connor returning to direct and Bill Dubuque (the original's screenwriter) taking care of the script, but that was in the summer of 2017. Nearly two year's worth of silence is quite a lot, but thankfully Ben Affleck has now provided us an update, via Collider - explaining that the film is definitely one that he wants to pursue:
Yeah, I hope so. I would love to. We’ve talked about kicking some ideas around, this last movie we just did. We talked to the studio and they seemed interested, and they kind of brought it up so, we’re looking to do that. I think it would be fun. I love Gavin, I love the movie I just did with him. I had a great experience and I love the character in The Accountant. I’d certainly be open to it.
The project that Ben Affleck is referring to is the film Torrance, which completed filming last year. A completely different kind of story and genre than The Accountant, the movie is a sports drama that follows a former star basketball player who tries to get his life back together by becoming the coach of the team at his old high school. The film is produced by Warner Bros. - the same studio behind Affleck and O'Connor's previous collaboration - and while a release date has not yet been announced, one can probably predict that we'll be seeing it come out some time in the fall.
As for The Accountant 2, it's actually a pretty exciting prospect, and right now could be a perfect project for Ben Affleck. Christian Wolff is a legitimately fascinating character - a public accountant with high-functioning autism who moonlights as an assassin - and the first movie really makes for a cool origin story. There are hundreds of stories that could be told with him going forward, and it could become a fun franchise role for the star.
For what it's worth, we might already have an inkling of a plot for the proposed sequel, as Gavin O'Connor talked out some ideas with me when I interviewed him about The Accountant back in 2016. Discussing potential story ideas, he put forward a really dark direction for the world in which Christian Wolff lives, saying,
In the second one, if we're ever fortunate to do it, I keep having this idea of a Catcher in the Rye kind of thing. He's surrounded by children, dealing with slavery and these kids that are sex slaves and things like that... If there's a way to deal with that subject matter and him saving children, that's something I'd be really interested in doing.
For now, though, The Accountant 2 merely exists in theory. Of course, if we get any more details about it you'll be sure to find them here on CinemaBlend.
