Hollywood is planning to bring movies centring on the story of data-snooping whistleblower Edward Snowden and the equally controversial US drones programme to the big screen, according to the Hollywood Reporter.

Few details are available about either project, but the drones movie appears to be further along the road to a potential release. Production company Lakeshore Entertainment has picked up an untitled screenplay for an "action thriller with military elements" from writer Spenser Cohen, a recent University of Southern California graduate who last year sold a screenplay for upcoming true-life Somali pirate drama High Target Value.

Hollywood agency WME is said to be offering a film about Edward Snowden, who exposed the US National Security Agency's programme of widespread surveillance of its own citizens via the Guardian on 6 June, to studios.

Both projects – should they ever hit the big screen – are likely to be mired in controversy, as Kathryn Bigelow discovered after announcing plans to bring a film about the hunt for and killing of Osama bin Laden to cinemas in 2011. Zero Dark Thirty was expected to be an Oscars frontrunner, given the pedigree of Bigelow and its writer, Mark Boal, who both won Academy Awards for the Iraq war drama The Hurt Locker in 2009. However, concerns from politicians on all sides of the political divide about the film's depiction of torture in the search for al-Qaida's chief appeared to stymie its chances of prize success earlier this year. Zero Dark Thirty eventually took just one Oscar, for best sound editing, though its worldwide box-office haul eventually came in at a more than decent $108m.

Snowden's story in particular has all the ingredients for a successful Hollywood political thriller: intrigue, true-life cache and a maverick central character willing to leave behind his girlfriend and go on the run from his own government in order to expose the truth. Barack Obama's drones programme, meanwhile, has already proven itself a useful dramatic tool on the small screen in the highly acclaimed US TV series Homeland.