Friday, August 15, 2008

No Harry Potter Movie for this year

In an unexpected announcement, Warner Bros. Pictures  have made the decision to move the release of the sixth Harry Potter film, “Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince”, from it’s original date of November 21, 2008 to the next year, specifically on July 17, 2009.

Warner’s president, Alan Horn, explained the two reasons for this delay: “Our reasons for shifting ‘Half-Blood Prince’ to summer are twofold: we know the summer season is an ideal window for a family tent pole release, as proven by the success of our last Harry Potter film, which is the second-highest grossing film in the franchise, behind only the first installment. Additionally, like every other studio, we are still feeling the repercussions of the writers’ strike, which impacted the readiness of scripts for other films—changing the competitive landscape for 2009 and offering new windows of opportunity that we wanted to take advantage of. We agreed the best strategy was to move ‘Half-Blood Prince’ to July, where it perfectly fills the gap for a major tent pole release for mid-summer.”

The Teaser Trailer for the movie has been around for two weeks, building up the hype for the fall release.

I don’t like this decision at all. First, the reasons given for the delay does not have to do anything with the movie itself, the movie would be the same if releases on November. Second, the last Harry Potter movie was released over a year ago. And third, it delays the next movies for the last book, The Deathly Hallows Part I and II, originally intended for 2009 and 2010, to 2010 and 2011 respectively.