After 22 years, WALL STREET 2 is a go. Why do I get the feeling that a Bernie Madoff type character will figure into the plot?

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Wall Street 2: Michael Douglas and Oliver Stone reunite for sequel

Oliver Stone is to direct a timely sequel to Wall Street, the Hollywood film which introduced the world to the mantra: "Greed is good."

Michael Douglas will reprise his role as Gordon Gekko, the ruthless corporate raider whose rise and fall came to symbolise Eighties excess.

A sequel to Stone's 1987 original has long been on the cards, but the meltdown of the world's financial markets has given the scriptwriters a wealth of source material. "We need to keep the storyline under wraps, but it's literally ripped from today's headlines," said a spokesman for the movie studio, 20th Century Fox.

Douglas won an Oscar for his performance as Gekko, whose declaration that "lunch is for wimps" became a catchphrase for City boys.

The last film ended with Gekko facing prison for insider trading, but the sequel finds him back in business two decades on. Douglas, 64, described the returning character as "a great, old-fashioned villain" whose moral compass remains unchanged: "I don't think he's much different. He's just had more time to think about what to do."

Stanley Weiser, screenwriter of the original film, has complained that real-life traders looked on Gekko as more of a hero than a villain.

"After so many encounters with Gekko admirers or wannabes I wish I could go back and rewrite the greed line to this: 'Greed is good. But I've never seen a Brinks truck pull up to a cemetery,'" he said last year.

"If Oliver Stone and I had a nickel for every time someone uttered the words 'greed is good' we could have bought up the remains of Lehman Brothers."

Wall Street 2 will go into production this summer and is scheduled for release in 2010. New York, London and Dubai will feature as locations.

Charlie Sheen, who played an ambitious stockbroker in the first film, will not return. Instead, Shia LaBeouf is in talks to join the cast as the younger character who becomes Gekko's apprentice.