Timing is everything, so less than a day after President Obama focused his State of the Union speech on the economy, Fox has debuted a teaser for Oliver Stone’s Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps over at IMDb. Twenty-three years have elapsed since Michael Douglas’s Oscar-winning portrayal as Gordon Gekko. The denouement of Wall Street saw Gekko being implicated in illegal business practices. Now he’s exiting prison having served his sentence.
The teaser has the right mix of ’80s catching up to contemporary times. All you have to do is watch as Gekko gets his belongings before he leaves prison. One item will have you smiling.
Oliver Stone’s original film was the personification of 1980s excess with Douglas’s character advocating that “greed, for lack of a better word, is good”. In the trailer, he even acknowledges, “Someone reminded me I once said: ‘Greed is good.’ Now it seems it’s legal.”
Hopefully this will be a return to form for Oliver Stone and be his best film since Natural Born Killers, or at the very least Any Given Sunday.
Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps comes two years after Stone directed W. starring Josh Brolin as the then Commander-in-Chief George W. Bush. Brolin again teams up with Stone, but this is clearly a film headlined by Michael Douglas and Shia LaBeouf. But the rest of the cast list looks impressive as well: Carey Mulligan (An Education), Frank Langella (Frost/Nixon), Eli Wallach, Susan Sarandon and Charlie Sheen. Yep, Bud Fox is back. The screenplay comes from Allan Loeb (Things We Lost in the Fire, 21) with a story by Bryan Burrough (whose book Public Enemies was the basis for the Michael Mann film).
20th Century Fox will be cashing in early as it brings Money Never Sleeps to theaters on April 23rd, right before the summer blockbuster season kicks off.
