Oliver Stone’s Wall Street is probably most famous for a line that has wormed its way into the American consciousness: ‘Greed is good.’ The interesting thing about the line is that while it’s attributed to Michael Douglas’ character, Gordon Gekko, he never says it in the movie. Seriously. Go back and watch the film – what Gekko says is: ‘The point is, ladies and gentleman, that greed, for lack of a better word, is good.’ Even if you cut the first part of that line off, you still don’t get ‘Greed is good.’ It’s sort of funny how our collective consciousness works.
I’ll bet you that he says ‘Greed is good’ in the sequel, though. There’s been talk about a Wall Street 2 for years and years, with Douglas himself spearheading the whole thing. Now it seems like the whole process is reaching a kind of critical mass and we might see the film, which I had previously written off as wishful thinking, happen. In fact, producer Ed Pressman said over the weekend that he closed a deal with 20th Century Fox for the sequel, which will see Gekko getting out of prison – tanned, rested and ready for more high finance shenanigans.
The film will be called Money Never Sleeps, after a Gekko aphorism (I wanted to make a Neil Young reference here but couldn’t figure out how to make it work. Consider this a look inside a constipated mind), and it looks like Gordon will be the main returner – Oliver Stone has declined an opportunity to direct (possibly in favor of a Lifetime movie of the week) and Charlie Sheen’s character is not in the script, which is written by Stephen Schiff. I can’t say that I’ve ever wondered what would happen to Gekko after he got out of jail, and this movie is going to have really show me something special to get all that interested, especially since the original feels like Fight Club, in that it’s a movie whose fanbase doesn’t actually get the movie (ie, Gekko’s a bad guy). I worry that the sequel will pander to the base and not treat Gekko as a legitimate and real evil.