News of a sequel to Wall Street has been floating around ever since last year, but most of those stories got so mixed in with real stories about the failure of the market place that most citizens thought that Michael Douglas was taking over the closing bell in order to make sure that Merril Lynch wasn’t trading insider information to giant Geckos. Luckily, we’ve combed through all of the news stories, sorted them out, and we’ve braced ourselves for the inevitable. An inevitable that came today.
According to /film, Oliver Stone has inked the deal with Fox – which is pretty much the ideal situation, having a director return for his own sequel. Plus, Stone will probably bring a solid modern sensibility to the script. The decadence of the 80s has been replaced by the decadence of the 00s.
The good news is that Michael Douglas is in talks to return as Gordon Gekko. Otherwise, I’m not sure how a sequel would even happen. Do you recast Gekko? Or do you leave him out entirely? Neither sounds like a good option.
The bad news, and here’s where I get sarcastic and dickish, is that Shia LeBeouf is in talks to play a young trader who looks to Gekko as a mentor. This makes me want to burn all of money and go live in a cave where movies can’t find me. Not only does it not make sense to have a 15 year old on the trading floor (unless the script involves one violently madcap Take Your Child To Work Day), there’s just no way that LeBeouf could pull off a character with ethical complexity. Almost being able to grow a mustache does not mean that you can handle the weight of choosing whether to cripple a company with trading information. It also doesn’t necessarily mean that you get to slick your hair all the way back. It just doesn’t.
Meanwhile, those crazy cabrones over at Latino Review have revealed some of the story details including Gekko spending a decade and a half in prison for his misdeeds, his rise on the lecture circuit (which seems like a natural career move for the erudite asshole), and his mentorship of a young trader (seeing shades of the original) as a means to reconnect with his family.
My two cents would be to recruit the genius talent of John C. McGinley back as Marvin. The people demand it.
What do you think?
Related Topics: Casting
