Director Matthew Vaughn and screenwriter Jane Goldman will team up again for the big screen with the comic book adaptation The Secret Service, according to the Hollywood Reporter.

Vaughn, who dropped out of directing X-Men: Days of Future Past last year and was at one point heavily tipped to take on the first film in Disney's revival of Star Wars, is instead returning to familiar ground. The Secret Service is based on a comic book by Mark Millar, with whom Vaughn and Goldman collaborated on the 2010 superhero film Kick-Ass, as well as Watchmen's Dave Gibbons. It follows a veteran agent who takes a younger colleague under his wing for an investigation. The pair travel to a small town that harbours a mysterious secret connected to Mount Everest.

Twentieth Century Fox has picked up the option on The Secret Service after a fierce bidding war with rival studio Universal. Vaughn not only revived the X-Men franchise with 2011's First Class but achieved box-office success with the hyper-violent Kick-Ass, a project Hollywood studios refused to touch before Vaughn stepped in with his own money to back it. The movie, again co-written with Goldman, ended up taking $96m (£63m) worldwide on a $30m (£19.8m) budget, and a sequel, Kick-Ass 2, is due this summer.