An adaptation completely botches the original theme and message

[u/Morr4Seiya]

Mulan(2020)-They give Mulan superpowers which is not only lame it goes against the message of the original about equality and struggle,plus they removes Shang because apparently having Mulan date her superior was "problematic" even though Shang genuienely respected Mulan and their rank was never brought up

I am Legend(2007)-You know why the story is called "I am legend"? SPOILER ALERT the protagonist is the actual monster,humanity is gone and the vampires have a actual society and the protagonist kills and terrorize them

Animal Farm(2026)-On the very slim chance that Andy Serkis ever sees this,here's the thing Andy,Animal Farm was not a children work it was not supposed to have a happy ending,you never heard of cautionary tales before?

[u/FifteenEchoes]

Not really.

Verhoeven didn’t even read the book

[u/Archaon0103 → u/FifteenEchoes]

While he didn't read the book, he did have someone else read it for him and he specifically dislike the pro-military stand of the book because he had experienced the result of such ideology from WW2.

[u/FifteenEchoes → u/Archaon0103]

Ah yes, he had someone else read it for him, that makes it all better. Why not have someone else do the directing too? Hopefully someone who actually respects the source material.

[u/pyrhus626 → u/FifteenEchoes]

Because it wasn’t supposed to be Starship Troopers movie. It was originally its own IP with a script called Bug Hunt at Outpost 7 which is very, very similar to the movie we got. The script had the comedic / satirical undertones against xenophobia and jingoism with the teen romance subplot baked in. They couldn’t get any studio to pick it up, as usually happens to new ideas in Hollywood, until someone noticed vague similarities to Starship Troopers. When the rights to the book were bought and they pitched Bug Hunt as an adaptation it finally got the green light.

The original writers and producers still wanted to make their movie, not Starship Troopers. Verhoeven was their preferred choice for director back in the Bug Hunt days even if he wasn’t hired until after it became Starship Troopers in name. Verhoeven liked the script and the message of Bug Hunt, so took the job and made the movie the way its creators envisioned. During production he learned more about what the book Starship Troopers entailed and hated it, but that didn’t particularly matter because he wasn’t really hired to make an adaptation. He knocked it out of the park making Bug Hunt, but it all got messed up by sticking the name of another IP over top of it with a handful of name changes.

It’s a really instructive example of why and how film adaptations wind up so radically different. Nobody involved creatively on the movie wanted to make an adaptation, they made the movie they wanted to make with enough names borrowed from Heinlein to keep the studio happy.

I also think it gets misrepresented as Verhoeven disrespecting and satirizing the source material, but the satire against militarism and such was baked into it well before he was hired or the book was attached. He wasn’t attacking the book like a lot of Heinlein fans think.