The 1998 cult hit Rounders could get an extremely belated sequel, if the poker movie’s leading actors get their way. Matt Damon, who plays the protagonist Mike McDermott, told sportscaster and podcast host Rich Eisen that “everyone” involved in the original would like to see a Rounders 2, mentioning his costar Edward Norton specifically.
Asked by Eisen which of his movies he’d would most like to revisit, Damon said:
The one I’ve been talking about for years and—I just saw Edward Norton a few weeks ago, and all of us want to do it—is a second Rounders movie. Because so much has happened in that poker world in the last 25 years, it’d be fun to catch up with those guys.
Rounders is almost unquestionably the most popular poker movie of all time, and would at least be in the conversation for best gambling movie, although the competition is tougher there. As Damon acknowledged to Eisen, it bombed at the box office, but gathered a following over time, particularly during the early years of the poker boom.
How Late is Too Late for a Rounders Sequel?
The original Rounders suffered from being ahead of its time, predating Chris Moneymaker’s WSOP run and the ensuing explosion of online poker by five years. Even if Damon gets his way, the sequel might come more than 15 years past the optimal timing for its release—online poker, at least, peaked circa 2009, though the live game is still going strong.
Indeed, Damon told Eisen that a sequel almost happened at that time, or slightly after. He recalls that “10 or 15 years ago,” he was talking to the screenwriters, Brian Koppelman and David Levien, who had a sequel written and ready to go at that time.
He acknowledges that it would require extensive rewriting to keep up with developments in the poker world since then.
What they had ten years ago was fantasic and I’m sure they can augment and update it to where we are today, and make something great.
Just a few of the events that the new movie would have to acknowledge include:
- Online poker having appeared, grown to be a global phenomenon, and been banned from the US before returning to a few states.
- The World Series of Poker having grown its attendance more than 20-fold since 1998, gone through two changes of venue, and added online bracelet events.
- The appearance of countless new technologies for cheating at the game, including superhuman AI players.
- Young math whizzes having displaced gritty old-schoolers as the public faces of the game.
- The death of Doyle Brunson, McDermott’s idol and the most iconic player of the pre-online poker era.
It would also have to account for the aging of the characters themselves and the actors who play them. John Malkovich, who played the antagonist Teddy KGB, is now 70, while Damon and Norton are now in their 50s.
Rights to the Original Rounders Are the Hurdle
Unfortunately, but not surprisingly, the eagerness of the cast and writers isn’t enough to make a sequel happen. Hollywood being what it is, they will need to convince those who hold the purse strings—and the rights to the original movie.
Damon told Eisen:
You’ve got to figure out the chain of title and who owns it, and everyone’s got their hand in the pot. You’ve got to find a way to make a deal that makes sense for everybody, particularly the people who are going to make the movie.
That may ultimately be the sticking point. It would have been easier to make the business case for a Rounders II in 2009 when every second post on the internet’s poker forums featured a reference to the original. At the moment, most of the general American public’s attention is on sports betting as the latest new thing.
Still, it’s been apparent for a while that Hollywood producers are out of new ideas and looking to reboot every 20th-century favorite they can. It’s possible that they could squeeze a new Rounders in somewhere between the next, even darker incarnation of Batman and the 37th Star Wars spin-off series.
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