Helldivers 2 prompting people to rediscover Starship Troopers, which game director says is "incredible"

Cult 90s sci-fi film Starship Troopers has had a bit of a renaissance of late, which has been attributed to the releases of Helldivers 2 on PlayStation and PC.

According to online TV ratings tracker Television Stats, the 1997 release has seen its viewership stats, Wikipedia rank, and IMDB rank all see a significant rise over recent days.

A quick browse through social media will see several posts linking this renewed interest in Starship Troopers with the release of Helldivers 2 earlier this month, and this hasn't passed the game director by. Sharing some stats on X showing an increase in Starship Troopers' popularity, Johan Pilestedt said: "This is incredible!"

What's more incredible is the film's popularity has actually risen 20 places since Pilestedt's comment. According to the tracker, Starship Troopers is currently the 25th most popular film online at the time of writing. It was sitting at #45 a few days ago.

All in all, that's not bad for a film that was released almost 27 years ago with very little critical acclaim.

Helldivers 2 has seen some incredible numbers since it was released. Its current player peak on Steam is 411,359. This is an increase since the weekend, when the game overtook records for Steam stalwarts such as Rust, Destiny 2 and even GTA5.

"With its high-chaos, high-comedy firefights, Helldivers 2 is a riot to play with friends," Emma Kent wrote in Eurogamer's four star review.

"Despite the issues surrounding matchmaking, when Helldivers 2 works, it's a wonderfully slapstick co-op experience. Unexpected and memorable events seem to occur in nearly every battle, and I already have a stock of ludicrous stories from my first week with the game."