Dear Gossips,
Happy Valentine’s Day to all who celebrate, or, as I like to call it, “Congratulations on not murdering your partner for another year!”. But we’re not here to talk about made-up holidays, we’re here to talk about The Accountant and its upcoming sequel, The Accountant 2 (finally, a straightforward title).
As Lainey mentioned yesterday, The Accountant 2 will premiere at SXSW in March, and following the first-look images, the trailer dropped.
Math Man returns!
The Accountant is Ben Affleck’s best superhero movie, and I am not even kidding. The film is maybe not so great in its depiction of autism spectrum disorder, but it’s one of those films that is so spectacularly stupid and so completely committed to the bit that it ends up being a lot of fun. So I’m excited for the sequel because I genuinely like the original. Also, I am always interested to know if the “Jon Bernthal dies in the end” streak remains alive. The Accountant is a rare film in which nothing bad happens to Jon Bernthal’s character, will that continue in the sequel?
But The Accountant is interesting for another reason, and that is its success on streaming. Back in 2016, the film did pretty good in theaters, but it found a second life on streaming, where it became a top movie on Netflix, and then a hit for its parent company Warner Bros. when it excelled on Max, too. It was this streaming success that fueled interest in a sequel.
For a time, streaming seemed like it would kill the notion of the “Saturday afternoon flick”, the kind of movie you watch on a Saturday afternoon just because it’s on. This kind of casual viewing kept Top Gun popular across two generations, and it fed multi-generational love for Grease, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Dirty Dancing, Road House, and Caddyshack, among others. But the onset of streaming and customized algorithms seemed to kill the idea of casual at-home film viewing, where you might be exposed to everything from a classic western like Unforgiven or Pale Rider to a rom-com like Pretty Woman to a drama like A Few Good Men, or even a classic film like Seven Samurai or The Seventh Seal.
But then something funny happened. People started “Saturday surfing” streaming platforms, picking out the kind of movies, like The Accountant, that once would have occupied a couple of hours on TNT on a weekend afternoon. It seems like our desire for this kind of dumb-fun movie, a movie with a silly premise but competent execution (see also: my review of The Gorge later today), transcends technology. You might take away our basic cable subscriptions—okay, we give them up willingly—but you will never take away our stupid Saturday afternoon movies. Those, we will find no matter what.
Live long and gossip,
Sarah
