Good thing someone is! The first film's director, Oliver Stone, has signed a deal with Fox to do a sequel to his 1987 horror movie about the "greed is good" ethos that swallowed up so many New Yorkers in the 80's. Michael Douglas will reprise his role as Gordon Gecko—he won an Oscar on the first go around—but Charlie Sheen (and, presumably, Daryl Hannah) has been replaced. Who's pissy and annoying now, just like Sheen was back then? Shia LaBeouf! He'll play a young upstart, and the current economic clusterbungle will be factored into the story. Allan Loeb, who wrote the sorta-similar cocky young guy movie 21, will pen the script. Stone hasn't really been crankin' out the hits of late, so we are a bit skeptical, though there's some cautious optimism lurking around, because the first one was just so good.

It should be out by the time no one has any money left to buy movie tickets.

Look at it this way: Hollywood hasn't sold a domestic crisis to moviegoers in years. At least not as a drama, anyway; Michael Moore exceeded documentary standards with Fahrenheit 9/11, but the War on Terror, Hurricane Katrina and other recent, rattling history are nowhere at the box office. Vietnam hit and (mostly) missed between 1975 and 1990, with exceptions including The Deer Hunter, Coming Home Platoon and Born on the Fourth of July. Since then, it's all about the distractions; 24 works because Jack Bauer is your kind of torturer. He's as much of an escapist as you are.

The financial meltdown offers few such release valves. The familiar, curious comforts of Wall Street and Boiler Room are flying off rental shelves, according to The New York Times, but the next crop of business-themed productions — from Lifetime's Candace Bushnell adaptation Trading Up to the Gekko follow-up Money Never Sleeps — are as stillborn as Stop-Loss and Body of Lies before them. Maybe they need dancing chihuahuas, as Paul Haggis hints to the NYT, or, as an NBC programming boss told Bloomberg today, at least "exemplify the foolishness of the human condition in the world of finance'':

Time Warner Inc. has slated Confessions of a Wall Street Shoeshine Boy for 2009. The movie follows a reporter who uncovers corporate criminals by befriending the man who polishes their wingtips. [...] The New York-based media company will release The Wolf of Wall Street in 2010, based on the autobiography of a stockbroker involved in a 1990s securities fraud. [...]

The rush to exploit the crisis may lead to films lacking nuance and depth of character, said Stanley Weiser, who co-wrote the original Wall Street and wrote W., the film about George W. Bush that opened on Oct. 17.

"They'll make cartoonish villains out of these people,'' said Weiser, who said he wrote a script summary for the Wall Street sequel, then stopped work when the original's co-writer and director, Oliver Stone, dropped out.

Better cartoonish than otherwise, these days, though, with the summer shaping up the way it did and BHC giving up its box-office supremacy last weekend to the video-game adaptation Max Payne. Or maybe skip the money drama altogether for now: We're already worried enough about the industry surviving itself, let alone a prolonged recession (or worse). Anyway, if ever the climate looks troublesome in the near-term, just remember what our old friend Arthur the Haitian Weatherman always says about the extended forecast: "Pretty much everywhere, it's going to be hot."

• In Hollywood, the Wall St. Plots Will Thicken [NYT]

• Hollywood Casts Wall Street as Villain to Tap Anger at Crisis [Bloomberg via DHD]

Variety notes that Allan Loeb is working on the script; he previously wrote 21, a wobbly adaptation that nevertheless capitalized on card-shark fever en route to a $157 million worldwide gross earlier this year. With financial destitution having since replaced more innocuous gambling as all the rage six months later, we're not ashamed of our curiosity as to how Michael Douglas's cutthroat inside trader Gordon Gekko would shuffle back to Lower Manhattan to set things right for a new generation of ambitious douches like Bud Fox — the Sheen character whom Gekko disposably exploits before heading off for a long prison vacation. And how many Jim Cramer/Neil Cavuto/Marisa Bartiromo cameos will reintroduce Gekko to the business culture that's long since forsaken him?

So many questions, though Fox has at least one unambiguous casting demand: The film won't happen without Douglas agreeing to reprise his Oscar-winning role. He's not officially attached (and neither Sheen nor Stone are expected to return), and Mel Gibson's brave stand against Lethal Weapon 5 has actors across town united against the perversion of their most celebrated characters. It's nothing former commodities trader Loeb can't fix, though, peppering his script with awards-clip-ready dialogue bites and, if possible, Gekko's redemption by single-handedly lifting the Street out of its historic funk. After all, the Dow was up 936 points Monday on news of the sequel alone! Let's put this crisis to bed today — make two sequels at the same time, Hobbit-style. Greed is good.

• Fox, Loeb up for 'Wall Street' sequel [Variety]

Sure, they're not the worst odds anyone's ever acted on, but history isn't everything. Or actually, when you crunch the numbers, it might be. Is the film industry's bullishness just heedlessly setting itself up for a crash?

Hollywood floored it 80 years ago as well, greenlighting scores of films after the stock market bombed in 1929. Studios experienced a surge in net profits in the years before the crash (largely attributable to the advent of talkies) but had difficulty sustaining any of it when spending increased to establish sound on sets and in theaters. Moreover, box-office receipts plunged from 1930 to 1933, by one count dropping almost 38% to their Depression-era ebb at $482 million. Much of this could be blamed on the drop in screen counts, which would continue to erode by more than 35% until their 1935 low of 15,200. But grosses picked up along with ticket prices, with viewers paying around 28 cents each by the end of the '30s.

Production spiked as well, which is where the contemporary parallels get messy. But bear with us: Hollywood distributed 622 films in 1931 and 672 in 2007. Last year's box-office grosses were a record $9.6 billion — adjusted for inflation, $100 million less than the the total gross in 1931. Worse yet, the average ticket price during that time would cost $3.06 today. That's less than half the current national average of $7. We could go on like this all day... throughout the '30s the average film cost around $6.7 million in today's dollars, Michael Bay is spending $225 million on Transformers 2, etc. etc.

The National Association of Theater Owners has long insisted that its business is recession-proof despite jacking up prices for concessions and desperately plugging commercials into multiplexes — neither of which constitute especially reliable sources of income as both viewers and media buyers pare back. Studios themselves have leveraged their output through home video, VOD and international deals, but the numbers suggest that audiences just don't escape to new movies — at least not enough new movies — the way they did 70+ years ago, whatever the medium; 1930s Hollywood didn't have the Web, cable (or even TV for that matter) or video games to contend with.

It also didn't face a looming SAG strike, which, for what it's worth, union president Alan Rosenberg says he has support for and could draw a vote within the next month. Studios have already called his bluff, but if he's successful, notes Variety, the stoppage could cost higher-budgeted films in production as much as $500,000 a day while a new contract is hashed out — a worst-case tailspin in an economy where even Steven Spielberg had to mortgage his future with an Indian media conglomerate.

Yet the machine lurches along, as creatively financed as ever (déjà vu: Wall Street also invested heavily in the sound era as well before the 1929 crash severed that lifeline) and utterly sure — arrogant, even — in its confidence that audiences will pay between $9 and $13 to watch Seth Rogen in The Green Hornet. No pressure, Seth! You'll always have history on your side.

One of the problems is that Mr. Sanghoee wants to direct it himself. Also, it's a movie about Wall Street coming out during a recession. Also, it's a self-funded vanity project that will end in tears and massive debt. And films financed in this briefly fashionable style have all tended to do poorly. (Remember The Kingdom?)

A fund in Atlanta weighing a $7.5 million investment has cut back by $3 million. A $5 billion hedge fund group that was supposed to handle debt financing now has other priorities, namely liquidating 80 percent of its holdings.

Still, the world is full of suckers with money, and they're often willing to give it to fellow suckers with money. So this film will probably get made, in some fashion. And we'll all get to experience that increasingly common joy of watching bad things happen to bankers when it tanks. If we even notice it come out.