The number-heavy world of accounting hasn't traditionally played a big role in the entertainment industry, but could The Accountant 2 change that? By looking at the upcoming movie and its prequel, we can get an idea of how this activity fits into popular culture now.
A Brief Review of The Accountant
2016's The Accountant is an action thriller where Ben Affleck plays the role of Christian Wolff, an autistic accountant who studies, or uncooks, the books of suspected criminal organizations to find out what secrets they're hiding. As you'd expect from a film in this genre, it attempts to spice up the art of reviewing financial data through tricks such as showing Wolff go through 15 years of books in a single exhausting night to unravel a giant embezzlement scheme.
The movie focuses on action scenes - with a focus on a Malaysian martial art known as pencak silat - but there's enough attention put on the accounting elements to keep number crunchers happy. For example, a neat touch comes with the way that Wolff tries to keep his identity secret by using aliases that have been based on history's most influential math geniuses. This review suggests The Accountant manages to add some fresh points of interest to the accounting industry but goes a bit too far by introducing hard-to-believe plot twists.
What Do We Know About The Accountant 2?
The 2016 movie was successful enough to warrant a sequel, called The Accountant 2. Affleck is back in the main role, while Jon Bernthal will again play his brother Braxton. Cynthia Addai-Robinson returns to play Treasury agent Marybeth Medina, who seeks out Wolff's help after the murder of someone she knows offers up a clue that leads her in his direction.
Its premiere came at the 2025 South by Southwest Film & TV Festival in Austin, Texas, and we expect to see it land in movie theaters across North America by April 25. There's already been talk of a third movie and a TV series leading from this project, which would give us some more opportunities to see the main character uncooking some books. The trailer suggests a similar mixture of action and financial puzzles to be unraveled that made The Accountant such a big success.
Other Movies Where Accountants Took a Lead Role - Casino and The Shawshank Redemption
1995's epic Casino by Martin Scorsese stands out as one of the most interesting movies to put an emphasis on people who work with numbers. Robert De Niro stars as Sam "Ace" Rothstein, an expert at setting odds who goes to Las Vegas and uses his math prowess to help his casino grow over the course of several decades.
While this movie shows a version of the story of how the Las Vegas casino industry became so big, it no longer represents the casino experience that the majority of modern players find online. Slots at the casino are immensely popular in our current world, offering a ton of variety and creativity, often serving as a marker of just what can be achieved in this space and how far we've come. Themed slots at the online casino have totally reimagined the much-loved classic that we might have seen in movies like Casino, making use of modern technology like random number generators.
Casino slot titles today, including Hit the Gold and Golden Buffalo, follow the traditional gameplay of slot machines, where the player hopes to see a line of matching symbols creating a win. The odds are shown in the return to player figure, with game designers using sophisticated software to create fair games. That's true across the board, not just in slots, and means that today's casinos aren't relying on a handicapper like Sam to set the odds in the casino: it's all done by machine.
If you've watched The Shawshank Redemption from 1994, you might recall that the main character is Andy Dufresne, played by Tim Robbins, who has a background in banking and accounting. He's serving a life sentence in prison despite claiming his innocence, but his situation becomes easier when he starts giving tax advice on savings to a guard.
Money matters play a big part in this movie's plot, helping it to become one of the most-loved films of all time despite initially performing poorly on release. It's one of the best examples of how a relatively complex storyline about finances can be woven into a mainstream movie that combines elements of action and drama.
The Future of Accountants in Films
These examples show how accountants and accounting are portrayed in some hugely successful movies. It's no secret that the directors look for ways to spice up this subject, but it's fascinating to see how the art of crunching numbers is still considered a key plot element in many cases. If The Accountant 2 is another big success, we can hope to see the third film in the series before long, and that might spark even greater interest in movies where accountants take the lead role.
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