Universal finds 'Where's Waldo?' and Javier Bardem joins 'Wall Street II'

By Sarah Sluis

As a kid, I could never find Waldo in the Where's Waldo? books, but it looks like I'll have a much easier time seeing him on the big screen. Universal and Illumination Entertainment won the bidding war to turn the books series into a movie. There's no plot or characterization in the books, which usually feature Waldo hiding among a chaotic mass of people, many of them misbehaving, but I imagine him as a wide-eyed observer, lost in his own world. In my mind, there's a bit of Mr. Magoo, Buster Keaton, or Inspector Clouseau (The Pink Panther) in Waldo--that certain kind of charming obliviousness. The other appealing part of this project would be the possibility for elaborate visuals: sight gags, crowd scenes, and humor only visible to the audience. Because Where's Waldo? is more of a game than a book, the acquisition bears the most resemblance to the Hasbro properties that have been picked up--like Monopoly, Transformers, and Clue. With a fairly blank slate, it will be up to the (as-yet-unnamed) team of screenwriters to come up with a suitable character and adventure for the striped, bespectacled chameleon.

Oliver Stone's Wall Street II added Javier Bardem to its cast in the role of an evil hedge funder. I couldn't take my eyes off Bardem in No Country for Old Men (the role for which he won an Oscar), so I'm excited to see him reprise the role of a villain. Nikki Finke also fleshed out additional details of the plot: Bardem will play an unscrupulous manager of a hedge fund who has been shorting stocks. Gordon Gekko (Michael Douglas) will be wrapped up in his attempts to patch up his relationship with his estranged daughter, when his daughter's fiance, LaBeouf, approaches him for help after his mentor commits a mysterious suicide. Douglas agrees to offer his input, since he sees Wall Street's impending crisis, but only if LaBeouf can help him reunite with his daughter. This sequel seems to tie in family and romantic relationships much more heavily than the original, but these could, of course, be de-emphasized in the film. As someone who loved Wall Street, I'm thrilled to see Gekko on the big screen again, in what seems to be a promising launch of the sequel, fast-tracked for an August production start date.