The Accountant 2 reportedly in the works, confirms Gavin O’Connor

It’s been nearly five years since the release of Gavin O’Connor’s The Accountant starring Ben Affleck, and although a sequel was announced less than a year later, there hasn’t been much movement on the project. While speaking on the CinemaBlend podcast, Gavin O’Connor confirmed that he “literally just closed” a deal to return for The Accountant 2.

We are doing an Accountant sequel. 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.

The Accountant starred Ben Affleck as Christian Wolff, a math 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. Gavin O’Connor confirmed that Ben Affleck would be returning for The Accountant 2, but didn’t say whether Jon Bernthal would be back as well. However, given O’Connor’s description of the second film, it’s clear that he’s banking on Bernthal returning.

The last we heard of The Accountant was that it could take on the form of a TV series instead. “We’ve talked about it,” Affleck said. “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′.” Now that it seems that the project has transformed back into a feature film, are you ready for The Accountant 2?