Ben Affleck adds an Accountant sequel to his ledger

We weren’t especially warm on Ben Affleck’s action-thriller The Accountant, which hit theaters back in 2016—i.e., smack in the middle of Affleck’s “pretending to be happy about being Batman” period. Our own A.A. Dowd pulled no punches in his review of the numerically adjacent action flick, using words like “unremarkably,” “scattershot,” and the never good-to-see “grinds to a halt” to describe Affleck’s take on a man with autism, who is as good at kicking seven kinds of shit out of bad guys as he is at doing the taxes of various criminal enterprises.

None of which, apparently, stopped The Accountant from being a modest box office success, scoring $155 million on its $40 million budget, presumably from audiences who just really love math, we guess. That return on investment was apparently enough to guarantee both a sequel and Affleck’s own continued interest, with Consequence reporting that the The Way Back star has found his way back to morally upright murder-bookkeeping. Director Gavin O’Connor (who also directed The Way Back, as it happens) broke the news on CinemaBlend’s RealBlend podcast, revealing that both Affleck, and Jon Bernthal, who co-starred in the original movie, will be reprising their roles for the sequel.

And really, we’re already salivating at all the potential financial crimes that Christian Wolff might solve/perpetrate/kill people in relation to next. After all, O’Connor noted in that same interview that he’s “always” envisioned The Accountant as a trilogy of films, allowing Affleck’s character to uncover all sorts of fiscal wrongdoings. O’Connor also used the phrase “Rain Man on steroids” to describe the prospective third film, a truly ludicrous phrase that we can genuinely say we weren’t expected to have jammed up against our eyeball today. (See, it’s because Affleck and Bernthal’s characters are brothers, so they’re going to do a sibling buddy comedy thing. Regardless, though: It’s still wild.)