Bad news for Harry Potter fans: “Half-Blood Prince” is being pushed back
Say it ain’t so, Warner Bros.
When the studio announced earlier this week that it was pushing the release date for “Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince” from Nov. 21 to July 17, 2009, I was one of millions of fans who breathed a collective sigh of disappointment.
Adding insult to injury was the fact that Entertainment Weekly just published a huge cover spread on the film, based on the sixth book in J. K. Rowling’s series.
Bloggers have made much hay about Warner Brothers failing to warn its sister company off a major publicity faux pas. In any other, context, that’d seem like a well-calculated snub.
The Los Angeles Times’ Elizabeth Sneed speculates the pushback has something to do with the Broadway debut of “Equus,” which stars Daniel Radcliffe (Harry Potter to you) as a disturbed stable boy. With sexy pictures of Radcliffe, who appears nude in the play, coming out around the same time as a barefaced photo spread in Vogue magazine, such exposure might be deemed “too salacious for the young teenage girl market,” she writes in The Dish Rag.
(Personally, pics of dishy Dan make me want to see “Half-Blood Prince” even more. And I know I’m not alone in that.)
Regardless of any Hollywood hijinks, the biggest insult remains to the fans.
We have to wait another eight months for a film handcrafted for the holidays. Now, instead of watching the adventures of Harry, Ron and Hermoine, we’ll have to satisfy ourselves with “Bolt” (gag) and “Twilight” (eh). And international “Harry Potter” fans may have to wait even longer.
Of course, the “Half-Blood Prince” video game is still set to come out in November. Thanks for the plot spoilers, chumps!
Warner Brothers CEO Alan Horn assures us that there’s another silver lining: “There would have been a two-year gap between Half-Blood Prince and the much-anticipated first part of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, which opens in November 2010.”
At least we have three films to look forward to, instead of two. Sigh.
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Meanwhile, FOX News reports that Daniel Radcliffe suffers from a neurologically based disorder that makes things like tying shoelaces difficult.
Radcliffe, 19, talked about the condition — known as development dyspraxia — in an interview marking the Broadway debut of his play “Equus.”
The disorder can affect gaining and using new skills and impair the normal process of learning, according to Dyspraxia USA.
As Radcliffe’s spokeswoman told the Daily Mail, “Yes, Dan Radcliffe does have dyspraxia. This is something he has never hidden. Thankfully his condition is very mild and at worst manifests itself in an inability to tie his shoelaces and bad handwriting.“
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Photo courtesy of MovieWeb.com.
She Likes to Watch 
dyspraxia, a? well that explains my autograph…