QUICK TAKES - April 29, 2009

It looked as if 20th Century Fox’s “Money Never Sleeps,” the sequel to Oliver Stone’s riveting 1987 drama “Wall Street,” was dead in the water, especially after the director told MTV News earlier this year that he’d abandoned the project.

But Fox is now saying the movie has a green light again. Stone is back aboard as director, Michael Douglas will reprise his role as Gordon Gekko and the studio is in negotiations with Shia LaBeouf to play a young Wall Street trader under Gekko’s spell -- a somewhat updated version of the character Charlie Sheen played in the original film.

Fox hopes to have the film in production as early as this summer.

The film is now simply going under the title of “Wall Street 2.” No one is offering a lot of specifics about the story line, except to say that the focus remains on the Gekko character, whose exploits will closely reflect much of the greed and chicanery seen in the last year on Wall Street.

-- Patrick Goldstein