That’s right. Routh’s days of hanging out near the employee entrances of bakeries and butchers, where he’s reportedly engaged in mano-a-mano duels for nightly scraps (though never in the WB-owned Superman suit) are over, at least for the few weeks it’ll take to shoot the film Dead Of Night.

Dead is the adaptation of the Italian comic book Dylan Dog, which I’ve long seen on shelves but never read. So I turned to Wikipedia, which tells me that "Dylan Dog is a penniless nightmare investigator who defies the whole preceding horror tradition with a vein of surrealism and an anti-bourgeois rhetoric. The true monsters in many of these stories are human beings."

The character sounds like a sort of Italian Buckaroo Banzai: he plays music and enjoys hobbies and crafts, while skirt-chasing women who look like his mom and dealing (sometimes literally) with the shadow of his father. Maybe not so much like Buckaroo Banzai, then, and more like my Uncle Ritchie.

Dylan Dog dresses in the Argento Italian style with black jacket and red shirt, and his look was supposedly inspired by Rupert Everett, who has already set his agent and business manager on the trail of royalty payments for every article written about the movie — maybe comic creator Tiziano Sclavi should have chosen a less powerful acting personality to base his character upon? Like Brand…oh, never mind.

(Edit after my screwup and notices by smart messageboard members Kabong and Phil!: The Everett correlation is no mere whimsy, actually, since Dylan Dog has already been adapted, sorta, to film: the go-out-and-buy-it-right-now* thoroughly fucking wonderful Dellamorte Dellamore (aka Cemetery Man) was based on a novel by Sclavi, starring Everett as a kind of alternate — very alternate — Dylan Dog. If this film is fractionally as entertaining as that one, it’ll put Routh on my good list for a long time.)

No real details on the script yet (by Joshua Oppenheimer and Thomas Dean Donnelly) but the $35 million dollar film is produced by Arclight Films, directed by Final Destination 2‘s David R. Ellis. If Ellis was a Red Lectroid, the pre-pro meetings might sound like this: "Where are we shooting?" Connecticut! "When?" Real soon!

*I mean it. CLICK HERE to buy it from us and Amazon for a mere six fitty.