Lobo is a strange comic book property: the character is a grizzled, violent, foul-mouthed intergalactic mercenary/bounty hunter, but he’s also a parody of the serious version of those sorts of characters. He was Deadpool before Marvel thought of Deadpool. (Just a bit before, but that’s good enough.) Lobo became a fan-favorite character in the early ’90s and has long been a wishlist option for a silver screen incarnation.

But making a Lobo movie is difficult — the character works on the page precisely because of the way in which he satirized the serious superhero trends of the mid to late ’80s. So now that DC and Warner Bros. are actively developing a film around the character, will those companies have the balls to use Lobo in a similar manner? Those serious Christopher Nolan Batman movies are just ripe for prodding by the mustachioed biker notorious for wiping out his own race.

I have doubts that the film will end up going that direction, as WB just set Brad Peyton, whose last two films were Journey 2: The Mysterious Island and Cats & Dogs: The Revenge of Kitty Galore, to rewrite and direct Lobo.

Deadline reports Peyton’s hire, but doesn’t have many more details on the film. Joel Silver has been producing, or trying to produce, Lobo for some time. At one point Guy Ritchie was tipped for the project, but he walked away from that quite a while back to do the Sherlock Holmes sequel.

Peter summarized the history of Lobo some time ago, and noted one possibility for the film:

The character first appeared in June 1983, created by Roger Slifer and Keith Giffen, Lobo was an alien who works as an interstellar mercenary and bounty hunter. He later had a huge resurgence as an anti-hero biker in the 1990?s. Which incarnation will be featured in the big screen adaptation? Variety describes a film version which is closer to the incarnation popularized in the 1990?s: “a seven-foot tall, blue-skinned, indestructible and heavily muscled anti-hero who drives a pimped out motorcycle, lands on Earth in search of four fugitives who are bent on wreaking havoc,” and “teams with a small town teenaged girl to stop the creatures.”

Things could well have changed at this point, given that Peyton is hired to rewrite.