Here's the Fanboys synopsis currently up on IMDb: "Star Wars" fans travel to Skywalker Ranch to steal an early copy of "Episode I: The Phantom Menace" for their dying friend."
Problem is, that's not the movie everyone will see when it eventually hits theaters. There's been a ton of talk surrounding the Fanboy re-cuts; how the cancer storyline was taken out, how Kyle Newman was replaced as director, and how the Weinsteins have pretty much turned Fanboys into a completely different film from what was originally intended. Yesterday, fans wrote into AICN claiming to have donated props for the film, and were upset over all these changes. So upset they were starting a campaign against The Weinstein Co., hoping to get Newman's original cut released instead of this new one.
Thanks to a well-placed, super delegate secret spy source, Cinematical was able to get the real skinny on what was going on with Fanboys. Some of this info is new, some old, but I have confirmed all of it to be true. First off, Kyle Newman definitely was replaced as director for the re-shoots by Steve Brill (Without a Paddle). The "dying of cancer" storyline was completely dumped, and, instead, the fanboys are now trying to sneak a copy of Phantom Menace simply because they're fans and want to see it. According to my source, the story is now "disjointed, nonsensical and lacking any heart."
Oh, there's more ...
Here's where it gets messy: Apparently, both versions were screened for test audiences -- and the new version only tested two points higher than the old version. My super delegate source also claims plants may have been in the audience -- there to pursuade moviegoers to vote against the original version -- but this has not been proven. In two days, after the old version was screened, Brill re-cut the film and they tested it again -- this time it was tighter, dirtier and contained nudity, lots of F-bombs, the whole works. And even with all that, it still only tested two points higher than the old version. But since Weinstein had to justify the fact that they spent an extra $2 million on the re-shoots, they went with the newer, flashier, Without a Paddle-esque version of Fanboys.
This new version, I've been told, is funny, but nowhere close to what it was supposed to be. It was supposed to be for fans who grew up with Star Wars -- it was supposed to be a love letter to George Lucas -- and now it's, well, Without a Paddle 2. The real problem here, I feel, is not so much the fact that the movie was re-shot and re-cut, but that the studio may have been using plants in a test audience to try to get moviegoers to sway their opinion. What the ***** is the purpose of a test audience then?
There's some more that I can't get into, but there you have it. There's still no word on when the film will arrive in theaters (if at all), but I'll be checking out a cut of Fanboys soon and will report back on how it is.
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