Eminem in Southpaw from Dreamworks

He may be just Marshal Mathers, but rapper Eminem is also gearing up for another major motion picture role. Its been about eight years since audiences enjoyed the debut of 8 Mile. Now Deadline.com reports that Dreamworks has “made a preemptive acquisition of Southpaw.”

Southpaw is a boxing flick meant to mirror the rapper’s real life struggles. “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.” Say, the plot sounds a little like Mark Wahlberg’s project, The Fighter.

Kurt Sutter, the Sons of Anarchy creator and executive producer, will write Southpaw. He said, “I took meetings with Marshall’s producing partners over the past 7 years, looking for something to do together. I know he’s very selective and doesn’t do a lot. 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 related news, they may be different as night and day, but Eminem and actor Robert Pattinson have been linked in the buzz of late. Pattinson says he was a little “obsessed” with the rapper in his youth. Both Pattinson and Eminem also made the Cosmo list of 2010′s hottest guys.