Miramax
Miramax’s Rounders is, without question, the best poker movie to ever come out of Hollywood and 25 years after the film’s release Matt Damon says there is a lot of interest in doing a Rounders sequel.
This discussion came on Matt Damon‘s appearance on The Rich Eisen Show this week when Eisen asked Damon if people ever come up to him and ask about doing sequels in movies. Damon dove right into saying there’s a lot of interesting in a Rounders sequel and that he’d just seen Edward Norton a few weeks prior who was also interesting, saying “all of us want to do it.”
There are complications. As Matt points out, the deal revolves around it making sense for the actual people who would be making the movie. And the original Rounders sequel that people had in mind would need to be heavily tweaked for the current state of poker.
Matt Damon went on to say that over the past 25 years since Rounders was released (on September 11, 1998) the poker world has changed drastically. When the original film came out it was just before the ‘poker boom’ was beginning to emerge due to the World Series of Poker being aired on ESPN and online poker exploding before ‘Black Friday’ took down the industry.
Since then, the style of play in poker has completely changed. Your average poker player now is exponentially better than they were back in the late 90s due in large part to GTO poker strategy (Game Theory Optimal) and solvers which has taught a new generation of players to play nearly flawless poker in every situation.
Poker rooms themselves have moved from behind closed doors like where Damons’ Mike McDermott faced off against John Malkovich as Teddy KGB and poker rooms can now be found throughout the country and are, in many cases, classy establishments. Seeing how a Rounders sequel would play out in the modern landscape of poker would be incredible and it would also do huge things for the poker industry which has been growing for years.