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Stone's Sequel to Wall Street: Giving Gekko A Heart

Published: Sep 23, 2010

 Finance       

Tomorrow afternoon, Oliver Stone's long-awaited sequel to Wall Street, his 1987 send-up of Reagan-era greed that inspired a generation of investment bankers and traders and starred Michael Douglas as Gordon "Greed is Good" Gekko, will be released in theaters nationwide.

In Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps, Douglas revisits his Academy Award-winning role of Gekko, taking on the almighty greedy one as he's released from prison and a young wannabe Wall Street tycoon, played by Shia LaBeouf, announces to Gekko that he plans to marry the greedy one's beautiful daughter, played by Carrie Mulligan. In a twist of sorts, or in a (fulfiiled) desire that Douglas would reprise the role of Gekko, in Money Never Sleeps, Stone has given Gekko a new character trait: a heart (or, at least, a third of a left ventricle). (Earlier this week, Stone spoke about his new film in an interview with Bloomberg.)

Whether the fleshing out of Gekko works or doesn't, is believable or not, remains to be seen (here I will admit that, despite the probabilty that the film isn't half of what its predecessor turns out to be, I am very much looking forward to seeing it, if only due to the allure of its trailer, which ingeniously utlilizes The Rolling Stone's "Sympathy for the Devil"). What we do know now, though, is that America is salivating over this film (if at first you succeed, do it again and as often as the funding allows for it has unfortunately become the motto across Hollywood in the past decade), saliva which has sent a few Hollywood studio execs plowing through their financial film libraries, digging up old winners, putting a new spin on them, in hopes that American moviegoers will be as hungry for their other sequels as they are for Money Never Sleeps.

We at In the Black have been able to get our hands on a few of these in-the-works finance films, and below is (trust us) the only one that sounds like it has the possibility of getting the green light:

Trading Places Deux: Cornering the Corn Market

In the sequel to John Landis's 1983 well-received buddy comedy, Trading Places, SNL alums Dan Aykroyd and Eddie Murphy reprise their roles as commodity trader extraordinaire Louis Winthorpe III and street hustler-turned-commodity trader extraordinaire Billy Ray Valentine, respectively. We pick up the action on an island in the tropics three decades after the two raked in millions due to well-played trades in the frozen orange juice market, the two growing tired of Ophelia, the hooker with a heart of gold, serving them fruit-infused cocktails swimming with dark rum (WINTHORPE: Looking good, Billy Ray! VALENTINE: Feeling a bit bored, Louis.). We follow Winthorpe and Valentine through their decision to charter a vegetable oil-fueled jet to the Windy City in hopes of cornering the maize future market, a coup they ultimately accomplish after overcoming 60 minutes of arrogant, young, stuffy, blue-and-gray-pin-stripe-suited adversity, before sharing a significant portion of their new wealth with the public school system of their hometown, Chicago.

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