Eminem teams with Sons of Anarchy creator for boxing movie, Southpaw

This sounds like a fantastic combination of talents….According to Deadline Hollywood, Eminem has signed on to do a movie called Southpaw, written by Kurt Sutter, the creator/executive producer of the critically acclaimed FX series Sons of Anarchy.

Like in Eminem’s 2002 screen starring debut 8 Mile, Southpaw will be fueled by the struggles that inform Eminem’s music and mirror his life. Eminem will play a fast-rising welterweight boxer who brawls his way to the title, only to see his world crash down around him due to tragedy. The movie is about his fight to reclaim past glory.

It’s nice to see that after one of the biggest year’s of Em’s career, he’s taking on a film project that shows that he cares about the team involved (ie Sutter), as opposed to some of the crap movies vehicles that many rappers take on as vanity projects, padded with their own inexperienced handlers and homeboys. The project involves some of the same movie studio people that worked with Em on 8 Mile, and will be produced by his manager Paul Rosenberg and Stuart Parr.
Sutter tells DH that he sees a parallel between being a lefty (southpaw) in boxing, and being a white guy in hip hop…and he also sees this new movie, as a continuation of 8 Mile.
Read his comments….
after the jump
Kurt Sutter (Sons of Anarchy) says:

“I’ve had a bunch of meetings with Marshall, and I know he’s very selective and doesn’t do a lot,” Sutter told me. “But he shared so much of his personal struggle in this raw and very honest album, one that I connected with on a lot of levels. He is very interested in the boxing genre, and it seemed like an apt metaphor, because his own life has been a brawl. In a way, this is a continuation of the 8 Mile story, but rather than a literal biography, we are doing a metaphorical narrative of the second chapter of his life. He’ll play a world champion boxer who really hits a hard bottom, and has to fight to win back his life for his young daughter. At its core, this is a retelling of his struggles over the last five years of his life, using the boxing analogy. I love that the title refers to Marshall being a lefty, which is to boxing what a white rapper is to hip hop; dangerous, unwanted and completely unorthodox. It’s a much harder road for a southpaw than a right handed boxer.”