‘Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince’ is going to do a disappearing act and vanish from its scheduled November release. It won't see the big screen until July of next summer. There's a lot of speculation as to what is behind the eight month delay.
The Hollywood Reporter thinks it's because the studio doesn't want the film to compete with the November DVD release of 'The Dark Knight', while the studio is looking at the numbers and sees more mega-buck$ can be made from a summer release. [coughThe Dark Knightcough]
The postponement was made to exploit the "relative dearth" of major summer blockbusters next year in the wake of the recent writers strike, Warner Bros. president Alan Horn said.
He also pointed to the 2007 summer success of "Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix," which grossed $292 million in the U.S. after its July 11 release. That was the second-highest total of any of the Potter films, behind only the first movie in 2001.
"There is no production delay or production consideration. . . . It feels like we have an opportunity in the summer," Horn said.
He added that he had seen the film, which is in the final production stages, and that it would "absolutely have been ready" by November. He characterized the shift as a business decision: "The question we asked is, what is best for this movie."
Horn said there was nothing on next year's schedule that compared to this summer's [coughThe Dark Knightcough] number of big-budget releases.
