From the irony-is-blind-in-Hollywood files, the New York Times is reporting that producer Edward Pressman and writer Stephen Schiff are developing a sequel to 1987’s Wall Street for 20th Century Fox, a movie called Money Never Sleeps, in which Michael Douglas would reprise his suspender-sporting, amoral business shark Gordon Gekko. (Director Oliver Stone would not be back, having declined repeated entreaties from the aforementioned trio.) There’s not much word yet regarding plot, on what Gekko will be
doing, other than still making bank and being a glorious a-hole about
it. In theory, though, he will have gotten a smaller cell phone than the giant, face-sized sat-phone he uses from the beach at movie’s end.

Wall Street grossed (only) $43 million domestically upon its release, but connected with the upper crust and became
a zeitgeist hit, inspiring inane, self-touting repetitions of Gekko’s
catchphrases, including the famous, “Greed is good.” Still, while I understand that there would be some enthusiasm for this project in the film world, Wall Street doesn’t really hold up as completely as one might think, and expectations on such a project would do well to be dialed down to the character-update range.

It’s also all ironic because Gekko, styled in part after the insider trading king Ivan Boesky and junk bond czar Michael Milken, from the mid-’80s, was the consummate financial feeder of his time (“I create nothing, I own” he proudly bragged), a role now chiefly occupied by the owners of giant media conglomerates like Fox’s own Rupert Murdoch, who swallows up companies and plugs them into his synergistic machine, which marches inexorably forward. One doubts Schiff’s script will take too keen and uninterrupted of a gaze at that…