Given that certain ideas probably seem more workable in a climate of despair, I hope Fox is irritated by today’s stock market resurgence. The studio has just publicly committed to pushing forward on Money Never Sleeps, the sequel to Oliver Stone’s 1987 film Wall Street. I hope for irritation mostly because anything that pisses off Fox is OK by me, but also because this seemed like a ridiculous idea when it came up a year and a half ago, and remains so now. The idea is to pick up with corporate raider Gordon Gekko twenty years after he went to jail at the end of the original film. Michael Douglas may return as Gekko if he likes the script; otherwise the only key member of the original equation to return may be producer Ed Pressman. That means no Stone, no Sheen. (Will Stone change his mind after W. tanks this weekend? Unlikely.)
This announcement is well-timed, because only a week ago Wall Street screenwriter Stanley Weiser wrote a great piece for the LA Times explaining that ‘greed is good’ wasn’t at all the message he intended people to take away from the film, and that much of Gekko was based upon Oliver Stone, not that the latter comes as any surprise. Weiser won’t likely be a part of the new film. THR reports that Allan Loeb has been contracted to script a page-one rewrite of the script Stephen Schiff turned in last year.