Fox revives 'Wall Street' sequel: Oliver Stone back on board

It looked like 20th Century Fox's "Money Never Sleeps," the sequel to Oliver Stone's riveting 1987 drama "Wall Street," was dead in the water, especially after the director told MTV News earlier this year that he'd abandoned the project, saying "I dropped out....We couldn't come up with the right way to go about it."

But Fox is now saying the movie has a green light again. Stone is back aboard as director, Michael Douglas will reprise his role as Gordon Gekko and the studio is in negotiations with Shia LaBeouf to play a young Wall Street trader under Gekko's spell -- a somewhat updated version of the character Charlie Sheen played in the original film. The sequel's original writer was Stephen Schiff, who has now moved on, with Allan Loeb ("Things We Lost in the Fire") having done a rewrite of the script. Fox hopes to have the film in production as early as sometime this summer.

The film is now simply going under the title of "Wall Street 2," having shed its original "Money Never Sleeps" moniker. No one is offering a lot of specifics about the storyline, except to say that the focus remains on the Gekko character, whose exploits will closely reflect much of the greed and chicanery seen in the past year on Wall Street.

Photo of Michael Douglas in "Wall Street" by Andy Schwartz.

Comments

[Christian Toto]

In a week in which we heard a remake of "Drop Dead Fred" is in the works ... this still ranks as the lamest movie project of the last seven days.

[John Small]

This is more lame than a sequel to "Drop Dead Fred?" In what universe?

I was never a big fan of the original "Wall Street," but I thought it was a pretty good film for its time. Given the current real world economic situation this could actually be a fairly interesting idea if handled properly. The only thing I find lame is the idea of simply calling it "Wall Street 2"; giving sequels only a numbered title (Jaws 2, The Godfather 3, Superman 3, Friday The 13th 4, Saw V, et al) strikes me as laziness. remember the old days when sequels to popular films had their own titles, such as The Bride of Frankenstein or Father's Little Dividend? At least the Star Wars and Star Trek films have had subtitles (The Empire Strikes Back, The Wrath of Khan, etc.)