Now 80 years old, Michael Douglas remains active in the world of Hollywood, still appearing regularly in movies and TV shows. He recently starred in the Franklin miniseries for Apple TV+, for example, and this role followed his return as Hank Pym in 2023’s Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania. Douglas also recently appeared in The Kominsky Method, a well-reviewed Netflix comedy series.
Much of Douglas’ most well-known work, however, is from the 1980s and ’90s. In 1984, Douglas showed off his action hero chops in Romancing the Stone opposite Kathleen Turner, and he revisited the character of Jack Colton the next year in The Jewel of the Nile. These two adventure films came before 1987’s Fatal Attraction and 1992’s Basic Instinct, also Douglas classics. Another 1987 film, however, remains one of the actor’s most memorable works.
Wall Street Earns An Impressive Accuracy Grade
The Michael Douglas Film Is Deemed “A Classic”
A former Wall Street trader awards Wall Street a high grade for its realism. Directed by Oliver Stone and coming only a year after his Oscar-winning Vietnam War movie, Platoon, Wall Street featured Douglas starring as Gordon Gekko, a ruthless Wall Street trader who takes ambitious young stockbroker Bud Fox (Charlie Sheen) under his wing. The movie, which won Douglas a Best Actor Oscar, explores the world of insider trading on Wall Street, with Bud using nonpublic information to gain access to Gordon’s inner circle.
In a recent video for Insider, former Wall Street trader Jared Dillian breaks down a scene in Wall Street in which Bud gives Gordon insider information. Dillian explains that the scene is actually fairly realistic for the time period, though he explains that things are different now and that there is an increased focus on insider trading from law enforcement. Check out Dillian’s analysis below, in which he calls Wall Street a “classic“:
God help you if you’re ever trafficking in insider information. You know, Bud Fox was kind of stuck. What you don’t see is that he gives a bunch of ideas to Gordon Gekko and he dismisses all the ideas and the one where he does have inside information, which is on his dad’s airline, is what he gives him. Yeah, not good.
I’m not an expert on the insider trading laws. Basically, what they call it nowadays is MNPI, which is material nonpublic information. After the crackdown on insider trading in the 2010s, hedge funds put a lot of policies and procedures in place to make sure that they do not receive MNPI.
There was a period of time, and everybody remembers, Galleon and Raj Rajaratnam and all the insider trading convictions from Preet Bharara in like 2010, that crackdown was effective and I would say that the hedge fund world is hyper-sensitive, and I would say paranoid, about coming into contact with any nonpublic information today.
That’s my favorite scene in Wall Street. “It’s 500,000 shares in the bag.” We used to say that at Lehman all the time […]
Well, it’s kind of like Trading Places. It’s not the most realistic clip in the world, but it’s a classic. I would give it an eight-and-a-half, but I’ll round up to a nine [out of 10] […]
My favorite Wall Street movie is Wall Street. And one of the reasons why I like that movie is because Oliver Stone basically threw a temper tantrum and said, “I’m going to make this movie to make everybody hate Wall Street,” and it totally backfired.
Everybody thought it was the coolest thing ever and everybody wanted to work on Wall Street. But Wall Street, I actually teach at the university level, and there was one semester we had like an extra class so I showed the movie to my class. And I’m like, “Yeah, this is kind of what Wall Street was like in 1987. You know, this is real.”
What The High Accuracy Grade Means For Wall Street
How The Oliver Stone Movie Was Received
After just how powerful Platoon was for Stone, there was a great deal of pressure on Wall Street, his follow-up. The 1987 financial film wasn’t quite as acclaimed as his Vietnam War drama, but it was still well-received. The film currently has a 79% on Rotten Tomatoes from critics and a stronger 81% from audiences, and it was also a box office success. Made on an estimated budget of $15 million, Wall Street grossed $43 million worldwide at the box office.
Platoon has an 89% critics score and 93% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes, and it remains one of Stone’s most-loved films.
Wall Street also had staying power, and Douglas’ Gekko became a well known figure in the world of pop culture. Stone would actually end up revisiting the world of his 1987 film with Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps (2010), which featured Douglas back as Gekko and Shia LaBeouf playing Jake Moore, his future son-in-law. The reception to the sequel, however, was mixed, and Stone’s Wall Street remains the more compelling and successful movie.
Source: Insider
