August 15th, 2008 2:47 pm

Harry Gets Shafted Worldwide This Time

After Chris’ previous little rant about how Warner Bros. should completely eat dirt. Our lovely little friends once again, over at Warner Bros. (our  favourite company *dry heave*), decided that Harry needs to grow up a little, mature even. So they’ve decided that they won’t let Harry out to play until July 17, 2009. Just in case you missed that JULY 17, 2009! A whole 8 months after its original release date in Australia. 9 months if you’re in the US or UK.

Alan Horn, President and Chief Operating Officer at Warner Bros. today said:

“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.” 

In other words: “Frack-Frack-Frack-Frack-Frack! We don’t have any good movies for release in 2009, so we better move ‘Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince’, or we’ll only make $10 billion dollars next year, instead of our usual $11.6 billion.”

Trust Warner Bros. to take the business side of things over their primary objective as an entertainment company, which is to make movies…and bizarrely…you know…let people actually see them!

They even went as far as to try and put a positive spin on this, saying:

“We know Harry Potter fans are eagerly anticipating seeing the final chapters unfold onscreen. In fact, the good news for them is that the gap will now be shortened between ‘Half-Blood Prince’ and the first part of ‘Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.’”

Uhhh, need I point out that they’ve also just widened the gap between ‘Order of the Phoenix’ and ‘Half-Blood Prince’…Oh wait! I forgot! That doesn’t matter, cause they’ve already made $1 billion dollars off us from ‘Order of the Phoenix’ (no, seriously, that’s how much they made).