Ben Affleck's The Accountant was a somewhat surprising hit. The 2016 action movie wasn't based on a popular comic book or other previous IP, and it wasn't a massive smash, but it made a tidy sum of money at the global box office, and was comparatively cheap to produce when compared to your average action movie. This combination led to talks of a sequel almost immediately, but four years later, nothing has materialized.
The Way Back reteams Ben Affleck with The Accountant director Gavin O'Connor, and so it's not surprising that questions about the supposed sequel are back on the table. It seems that one of the major delays in the follow-up is that screenwriter Bill Dubuque hasn't had the time to write the movie, which has led to some considering alternatives in order to make The Accountant 2 happen, simply find a different script, or change the medium. According to Affleck...
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?
It's a rare, but not entirely unheard of, practice for movies that aren't written to be part of a particular franchise to be retrofitted into them after the fact, and Ben Affleck tells Collider that there has at least been some conversation about doing that with The Accountant.
The main hurdle to that idea is that Affleck's character in the film has a form of high functioning autism, and it would be unlikely that any script that might fit well for The Accountant otherwise, would have that sort of detail included. This would mean the personality of the main character would need to be significantly rewritten, which might make the idea of using another script at all more trouble than its worth.
If not that, we could perhaps see The Accountant on television. Ben Affleck jokes that if that were to happen he might get some royalties out of the deal, which would imply that if the franchise does move to TV he won't be going. While the divide between "movie stars" and television that used to exist is basically gone, it doesn't look like Affleck is looking to spend time making a series.
What's clear is that there is still interest in doing more with The Accountant, but what's also clear is that we're nowhere near seeing the trigger pulled on any of it.
