There's a hot new topic on movie blogs today, with people saying that Matthew Vaughn left X-Men: Days of Future Past so that he could work on a movie called The Secret Service, based on a comic he co-created with Mark Millar. I have no idea why this news is being reported today, because it was reported the same day that he left the X-Men project. I guess everyone overlooked that part? Hell, it was in the first paragraph of the article I wrote about his departure. This is what came straight out of Deadline two weeks ago,
Vaughn will do another film for Fox, and I’m hearing it will be the drama Secret Service, an adaptation of the Mark Millar comic book series that Vaughn has been working on with the author.
This is one of the reasons I questioned him being up for the Star Wars directing gig. Oh well, I guess news travels slowly when people don't pay attention to the details. In a recent interview with CBR, Millar confirmed the news that Vaughn left X-Men to work on The Secret Service saying,
What we’re doing is that ‘Kick-Ass 2′ is filming now, and next year we’ll start production on ‘Secret Service’ which I did with Dave Gibbons, and Matthew and I have been talking about that for years. We thought Matthew was going to do X-Men first, but we found out there were actually a few imitators of ‘Secret Service’ in the works. People think you’re lying when you say you’re not trying to get your comics made into movies so quickly, but the two reasons it happens like that is first because it’s the best ad for the comic you’ll ever have. And for me, selling the book is the most important thing. The second reason is because people are always trying to rip you off. Somebody will start to work on a spec screenplay about your idea. There are three other projects I know of now about a James Bond kind of guy taking a street kid and turning him into a spy. Three screenplays were already going through Hollywood about this! So Matthew and I said, ‘F*ck this. We’re not letting anyone steal our ideas.’
The Secret Service has been described as Vaughn and Millar's version of Marvel's S.H.I.E.L.D. You can read a little bit more about the Secret Service project here if you want.
It would be pretty awesome to see Vaughn take on Star Wars, but if he's rushing to get The Secret Service made, then that probably won't happen. I'm sure Secret Service will end up being a hell of good movie though! What are your thoughts on all this?