Ben Affleck is finally returning to the world of The Accountant, with the long-awaited second movie in the series set to go into production later this year. The first film, released in 2016, featured Affleck as an assassin with Autism Spectrum Disorder, whose skills as a math savant go into his cover identity as a Certified Public Accountant. The movie, directed by Warrior‘s Gavin O’Connor, was designed as a franchise for Affleck, but had the challenge of debuting in between the releases of Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice and Zack Snyder’s Justice League movie.
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Between Affleck’s responsibilities to DC and his own directorial efforts, The Accountant kept getting pushed back. According to Deadline, the sequel is finally heading into production this year, with a likely 2025 release date.
The revelation popped up in an unrelated story; Affleck and Matt Damon are set to work together again in Animals, a kidnapping drama set up at Netflix. According to the Deadline report, Affleck will shoot Animals before heading off to work on The Accountant 2.
Back in 2020, after teaming up with O’Connor for The Way Back, Affleck talked about plans for The Accountant 2 (and beyond) during an interview with Collider.
“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.’”
The next year, news came that both Affleck and his onscreen brother Jon Bernthal were set to return for the sequel.
“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,” O’Connor said at the time. “So there’ll be more screen time for 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.”
