Ben Affleck's The Accountant 2 Trailer Kills Off A Major Character From The First Movie

Ben Affleck's 2016 action thriller "The Accountant" has enjoyed a fair bit of a success as of late. In the spring of 2024, it became Netflix's number one movie as viewers tuned in to enjoy the Gavin O'Connor-directed film's star-studded cast and wonderfully silly action. The movie stars Affleck as Christian Wolff, a seemingly unassuming man who's on the autism spectrum. He works as an accountant for various criminal organizations and also happens to be a highly proficient combat expert, which comes in handy when he has to deal with a massive embezzlement situation. This kicks off a complex spider's web of a plot that features characters played by folks like J.K. Simmons, Jon Bernthal, Anna Kendrick, Jean Smart, and John Lithgow.

The streaming success of "The Accountant" is just part of its current cultural prevalence. Now, "The Accountant 2" is set to hit theaters this year after premiering at the 2025 South by Southwest (SXSW), with director O'Connor and stars Affleck, Bernthal, and Simmons all returning for some good, old-fashioned crunching of numbers and heads alike. Indeed, the first trailer for the "Accountant" sequel only just dropped, and it seems that Christian Wolff hasn't missed a beat.

Rest in peace, J.K. Simmons. The trailer for "The Accountant 2" doesn't beat around the bush and quickly kills off Christian's longtime man-on-the-inside: the Director of the Treasury Department's FinCEN, Ray King (Simmons). From there, it follows U.S. Treasury Deputy Director Marybeth Medina (Cynthia Addai-Robinson) as she recruits Mr. Wolff to uncover the larger conspiracy that culminated in Ray's untimely demise, which in turn leads Christian to reach out to his estranged sibling Braxton (Bernthal) for help. A story about brothers struggling to rekindle ties, all while beating and/or killing the stuffing out of a whole lot of bad people? Now, that's what I call a Gavin O'Connor special.

"The Accountant 2" (which also has "The Accountant" scribe Bill Dubuque back on scripting duties) marks O'Connor's third collaboration with Affleck after the original "Accountant" and the deservedly celebrated sports drama "The Way Back," a film that was tragically buried by the COVID-19 lockdowns in 2020. With a splashy SXSW debut on the books and almost a decade of anticipation built in, "The Accountant 2" is in a solid position to perform much better at the box office (especially if word of mouth is there). We'll see if that's the case when the sequel rolls into town on April 25, 2025.