Multiple sources I've come across over the years have claimed that the movie started out as an original property and only became an "adaptation" of Starship Tro

Multiple sources I've come across over the years have claimed that the movie started out as an original property and only became an "adaptation" of Starship Troopers shortly before it went into production, when the studio realized they had an option on Heinlein's book and that it was sorta-kinda similar. (This is much the same thing as what happened to the movie I, Robot, which started out as an unrelated script, I believed called Hardwired.) My suspicion is that Verhoeven -- like Alex Troyas with I, Robot -- knew full well that their movies had very little to do with the source material and put on a game face in interviews. I've always wondered if the movie might not have done better in its initial run without the studio forcing that connection onto it. A film can't really be both a military dystopia satire and a good adaptation of Starship Troopers, any more than a brutal deconstruction of Objectivism would make a good adaptation of Atlas Shrugged.