Director Gavin O’Connor has one of the highest-profile movies of the fall coming soon in The Accountant, which features Ben Affleck as an autistic accounting expert who must draw on an unexpected backlog of combat and survival skills when he seemingly uncovers a dangerous corporate conspiracy. Prior to landing this project, O’Connor was known for directing sports dramas like Miracle and the 2011 mixed martial-arts feature Warrior.

Now, in an upcoming interview with Screen Rant, O’Connor has indicated that a sequel to Warrior is still a possibility.

Originally released in 2011, Warrior featured Tom Hardy and Joel Edgerton as two estranged brothers who find themselves training to compete (against each other) in a huge mixed martial-arts match – each man fighting for very different, personal reasons and initially unaware of the identity of his ultimate opponent.

While not a box office success upon its initial release, the film has subsequently earned a devout fanbase, particularly among fans of the mixed martial-arts sport which was, at the time, only just emerging as a market force in mainstream professional athletics. And while it resolves much of its central conflict by the end, the film also leaves the long-term future of both characters unanswered along with the ultimate fate of several adjacent plot-points, and fans have speculated for years as to what direction a hypothetical sequel might take.



In the following exchange, taken from an interview conducted by Screen Rant for The Accountant, O’Connor was asked about the legacy of the film and indicated that talks of a possible sequel have, in fact, continued:

Screen Rant: One final question, about one of your earlier films: Having made Warrior, one of the biggest Mixed Martial-Arts films of its time, how do you feel about how the appreciation of that film has grown in that [the MMA] community?
  • Gavin O’Connor: I’m grateful! I was trying to get that right. When I made that movie, it was still… MMA and UFC and that type of fighting, it just wasn’t as popular as it is today. And that movie, more than any movie I’ve ever made, I have a weird… there’s an amazing following of rabid fans, more than anything I’ve ever done. And I’d say that’s probably my most personal movie. So I’m really grateful and, y’know, maybe we’ll do another one!


Screen Rant: Well, that would be terrific to see!

  • Gavin O’Connor: Well, we’ve had some talks about that. Me and the actors.

While this can hardly be taken as any kind of official confirmation, it’s not exactly “typical” for filmmakers and actors to still be talking about the potential for sequels to movies that weren’t major successes five years after the fact; especially when the films in question aren’t part of long-running franchises like James Bond or the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Whether or not anything concrete emerges from these talks, however, remains to be seen.

The Accountant will be released in theaters on October 14, 2016.