When you’re typecast as the teen heart throb in those singing and dancing high school movies, how do you kick that persona in the ass and start getting taken seriously as an actor? Zac Efron hopes that quitting Footloose and getting in bed with Brian Michael Bendis, writer of many of the Marvel: Ultimate comics as well as the soon-to-be-adapted graphic novel Fire, will do the trick.

Deadline is reporting that the two spent a day together knocking on studio doors trying to get the project picked up. It took three tries, but eventually Neil Moritz and David Engel liked the idea and found the right people to get it moving. The script will be written by Bendis himself, adapting his own story about a college student who is trained as a CIA agent. He's double crossed and then tries to take revenge on his would-be killers. You can smell the Bourne coming off this project already.

Stacking his deck a little, Efron also signed on for a “Back to the Future-like” film for Warner Bros, which combines a pitch from the writing team of Tim Calpin and Kevin Jakubowski, and another project called Algorithm already being produced. No real details on how it resembles BTTF, but Nick Stoller (Forgetting Sarah Marshall) will direct so chances are they're going the comedy route.

It’s not unheard of for teen dreamboats to make the transition into the realm of manliness in the film world. Leonardo DiCaprio is possibly the best example, dooming himself to be typecast in Titanic but slowly finding his way to Gangs of New York and The Aviator and the final nail in his heart-throb coffin, The Departed. Fire sounds like exactly the right move for Efron to unstick himself from his current situation and getting started on his path out of high school.