MTV’s Movie Blog is trumpeting two exclusive new trailers for Across the Universe, Julie Taymor’s big budget period musical starring a pre-Marilyn Manson Evan Rachel Wood and set to the songs of The Beatles. These trailers are super different from the film’s international trailer, which Sony implanted on YouTube a few weeks ago. Where as the international spot seemed to play up the film’s non-musical elements (epic scope, romantic and political subplots, Taymor’s patented baroque psychedellia), these new trailers seem squarely aimed at the High School Musical crowd.

It’s probably a smart move for Sony to hedge their bets like this: the new, music-video-on-crack trailers have a shot at reaching the kids who are currently pushing Hairspray to $100 million, while the international trailer might lure their Boomer parents. But the both sets of trailers would seem to give credence to an idea disseminated by the hatchet job Nikki Finke wrote on Taymor back in March: it now seems probable that the movie Sony is unveling at Toronto next month is very different from the movie they hired Taymor to make.

Earlier, Finke reported that after a disastrous test screening, Sony tried to convince Taymor that her almost three hour first cut (which Finke’s sources alternately describe as “arresting”, “pretentious” and “absurd”) had to be whittled down for release. Taymor apparently flipped out at that suggestion, insisting that she had made a demographic-busting epic on the order of Titanic. Finke wrote that everyone else involved could see that this wasn’t the case. According to one of Finke’s (typically anonymous) sources, the general consenus was that “there’s a great movie in there, somewhere. But, as it stands now, it’s so complicated it’s just a bad movie.”

Finke went on to report that producer Joe Roth had an editor produce a 105 minute cut of the film, which he screened to a young, female, suburban audience to great acclaim, but Taymor still wouldn’t budge. The notoriously difficult director didn’t have contractual final cut, so by trying to appease her at all Sony was, in a way, going beyond the call of duty.

What’s still not quite clear is how the fracas eventually shaked out. This Playbill story, announcing Universe’s Toronto bow and release date, suggests that the Roth-supervised cut is the one that’s going to be seen. But back on March 19, Variety reported that Taymor was threatening to take her name off the film if Sony refused to release her cut. As of this writing, the director’s name is still prominently displayed on the film’s website. IMDb lists Taymor as the film’s director, but conspicuously doesn’t specify the film’s running time.

Judging by these trailers alone, my guess is that a compromise of some sort was reached — Sony got their teenage girl tentpole, Taymor was allowed to hold on to some of what Finke described as her “impossibly artsy-fartsy” vision. But in this day and age of quadruple dip DVDs, would it really hurt the studio to strike two prints of Taymor’s version, toss them on screens in New York and San Francisco, put the commercial cut everywhere else, and then release them both as separate DVDs? More opportunities to make money, fewer headaches and hurt feelings — no?