Cinematical has premiered a new poster for the forever-in-limbo comedy Fanboys. Check it out out at right and click for large view.

This latest poster is a take-off of the Judd Apatow comedy The 40-Year-Old Virgin, which is a very different marketing angle than the original Return of the Jedi-inspired one-sheet (see it here).

I think we’re at the point now where it’s safe to say that The Weinstein Company truly does not know what to do with this movie.

“Recently, studio head Harvey Weinstein told the LA Times that Fanboys has been moved to January 2009 so that it can be involved in a major promotion and large advertising tie-in with Comcast. This was a film that was supposed to be released early 2007, then got moved to August 2007, then was held in limbo after reports surfaced that a major plot point was removed. So, if it will actually be released in January — typically a death warrant for most films, except Cloverfield — remains to be seen.

Fanboys, while a comedy, was also supposed to be a love-letter to Star Wars and its die-hard fans, just like the film’s lead characters. A group of fans make a cross-country trip to Skywalker Ranch in an effort to see an unauthorized advanced screening of Star Wars: Episode I: The Phantom Menace. One of the friends is dying of cancer, and this is his dying wish. It’s this part of the story that the studio cut, thereby taking out the “heart” of the story and reporting turning it from the aforementioned love-letter to Star Wars fans to a mockery of them. This is what caused an uprising.

The die-hard group of Star Wars fans is played by Sam Huntington, Kristen Bell, Dan Fogler, Jay Baruchel, and Chris Marquette, which could be considered an Apatow-like gang, so I guess that’s the route The Weinsteins are going now. Had they keep the original plot in take and just went with the love of Star Wars angle, they’d have had a built-in audience already instead of trying to go for the raunchy teen comedy demographic (Fanboys is PG-13!).

In May, director Kyle Newman, who was unhappy with the studio’s cuts, told the NY Times, “I have been brought back into the editing room to work on a final version…. All the key people are back. That’s all good.” That was great news, but Fanboys has been jerked around so much at this point, that I still don’t know which version of the film will be released and if it’s really coming out in January (some sites list it as February 2009 — less of a death sentence). I’m hoping for the best, because those who saw the original cut had good things to say about it.