News District 9 director Neill Blomkamp is planning a new Starship Troopers movie

[News]

Promotional art for the 1997 movie Starship Troopers.

Columbia Pictures has tapped District 9 director Neill Blomkamp to write and direct a new Starship Troopers film, according to The Hollywood Reporter, giving the franchise its first live-action entry since 2008’s Starship Troopers 3: Marauder.

The movie will be based on Robert A. Heinlein’s 1959 book of the same name, not a remake of or sequel to 1997’s Paul Verhoeven-directed Starship Troopers, say the outlet’s unnamed sources. In that movie, characters played by Casper Van Dien, Denise Richards, Neil Patrick Harris, and Michael Ironside are part of a comically jingoist militaristic society at war with space bugs. Blomkamp’s wife, Terri Tatchell, will reportedly co-produce the new Troopers movie. The outlet does not say when it’s expected to debut.

Heinlein’s book has been criticized for celebrating military fascism — criticism that extended to Verhoeven’s movie when it was released, as The Hollywood Reporter notes. These days, it’s generally accepted that his movie was meant as a send-up of the book. In a Kennedy Center interview, Verhoeven said he’d hoped to show those who applaud the kind of over-the-top jingoism it presents that “what you have been admiring … might be evil.”

Blomkamp has unsuccessfully tried to make movies in other sci-fi franchises, including a sequel to the Verhoeven-directed RoboCop called RoboCop Returns. He’d also planned a new Alien franchise film, but that was put on hold in favor of Ridley Scott’s Prometheus follow-up, Alien: Covenant. Most recently, he directed Gran Turismo.