So when TriStar showed cold feet toward “Outpost 7,” Davison simply sought out the rights to the similarly themed Heinlein novel-retroactively turning the project into a Starship Troopers movie. At the time, TriStar was the home of producer Jon Davison, who made his bones by producing RoboCop from a screenplay co-written by Nuemeier and which was directed by Verhoven. However, long before the RoboCop director ever came aboard the project, it almost stalled out since no studio, including TriStar Pictures, took to the idea. Neumeier’s quote is a pretty accurate description of the movie Verhoeven would eventually make. Verhoeven is on record as saying he tried to read Starship Troopersbut stopped after two chapters “ because it was so boring ” meanwhile the movie began as a script called “Bug Hunt at Outpost 7.” Scriptwriter Ed Neumeier even described the original idea for the film as being “a big, silly, jingoistic, xenophobic, let’s-go-out-and-kill-the-enemy movie, and I had settled on the idea that it should be against insects… I wanted to make a war movie, but I also wanted to make a teenage romance movie.” You could even be forgiven for thinking the director had never read the book or that this was a completely unrelated film which has had the Starship Troopers title slapped on it to sell more tickets.īecause, as it turns out, both of those things are true. It’s a great movie, although not one that hues tightly to its source material.

This year marks 25 years since the release of Paul Verhoeven’s movie adaptation of the Robert A.

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