Paul Veerhoven’s Starship Troopers was fun, but not enough fun to be worthy of a sequel. That’s probably why when Starship Troopers 2: Hero of the Federation got made, it ended up straight-to-DVD. Well that, and the fact that it was completely terrible.

Weirdly, this doesn’t seem to have killed Edward Neumeier’s enthusiasm for making more of it. He wrote both the first and second movies, and now Production Weekly says he’s making a third one. This time, he’ll direct as well as write it.

How he found financing is a mystery, but it sounds almost as if this one might actually get a theatrical release. There’s even talk that Casper Van Dien may reprise his role as Johnny Rico from the first film, only this time promoted to a Mobile Infantry General. Starship Troopers 3 will find Rico and the MI still embroiled in a massive, interplanetary war against the Bugs.

The shame of it is that there’s still never been a decent adaptation of Robert A. Heinlein’s great book. Veerhoven’s Starship Troopers and these subsequent films wave the name of Robert A. Heinlein’s name around a lot, but the similarities between the movies and the novel are few, and pretty superficial. They’re terrible as adaptations. If this is another sequel, it’ll probably just continue down the same path. What needs to happen is a completely new film, a remake that actually uses Heinlein’s “Starship Troopers” as a reference point. Pushing onward with a completely dead franchise like this doesn’t make sense.