A storm surge of Wall Street-in-crisis movies is coming soon to a theater or television near you, and busy trend reporters are preparing us for the worst today with their grim surveys of what to expect in the weeks and months ahead. But beyond the obvious recycling of Wall Street for a new generation of jaded multiplexers, the forecast remains mostly sunny after early, patchy fog; we think you're more likely to see Papi and his Beverly Hills Chihuahua-mates yapping in theaters again before Gordon Gekko ever makes his return trip to Manhattan.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."