Well, well, well – Wall Street 2 just got a lot more interesting, with the news that Oliver Stone, who directed the original movie in 1987, is in talks to direct, while Shia LaBeouf is in negotiations to star alongside Michael Douglas, who will reprise his Oscar-winning role as financial Machiavelli, Gordon Gekko.
Douglas, of course, has been on board the movie, which will focus on Gekko as he comes to terms with an increasingly perilous financial market, overloaded and exploded by years of abuse by stockbrokers who bought into his mantra, ‘greed is good’. But Stone’s involvement in his first direct sequel somehow lends the project an extra edge of authenticity.
LaBeouf – who insisted at yesterday’s Transformers: Revenge Of The Fallen junket that he was currently out-of-work, the cheeky scamp – will play a young trader who, presumably, gets taken under Gekko’s malevolent wing, a la Charlie Sheen in the original.
Allan Loeb has written the script for the 20th Century Fox movie, which was once known as Money Never Sleeps. At the moment, **Wall Street 2 **seems to be the way they’re going.
Of course, they say that you should never go back, especially to the scene of your greatest triumph, but here’s hoping that the old Stone/Douglas team can rework their old magic.