Nikki Finke reports that the release date for Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince has been postponed by a factor of eight months, from its original release date on November 21, 2008 to July 17, 2009.
That means this film, the sixth in the series, will be coming out two years and six days after the previous film, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix — easily the longest gap between Harry Potter movies to date. The second movie came out only one year after the first movie, and each movie since then has been released after intervals of roughly one year and a half.
However, the intervals promise to get shorter again, after that. The seventh and final book, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, is being split into two films, with release dates currently planned for November 2010 and May 2011 — and Finke says the change in release date for Half-Blood Prince “does not alter the production schedule” for Deathly Hallows.
The change in release date also means that 2008 will be only the second year since 1996 in which there was no new Harry Potter book or movie — unless we count the 800-word prequel that J.K. Rowling dashed off for a charity auction earlier this year, or the upcoming re-packaging of The Tales of Beedle the Bard, a handwritten copy of which was auctioned off in 2007. The other year without any new Harry Potter product was 2006.
Not coincidentally, I assume, the new release date is also almost exactly one year after the release date for The Dark Knight, and the Batman movies, like the Harry Potter movies, are produced by Warner Brothers. Releasing these mega-sequels in mid-July is working out very well for them, isn’t it?
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