Almost two years after Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix became one of the world’s highest-grossing films of all time, people are now readying for Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince to hit the big screens this summer.
Half-Blood Prince will be the first Potter film released since Rowling’s final Potter installment was published in 2007. Box office figures will reveal whether or not the Harry Potter fanaticism which gripped the world throughout the books’ releases continues to hold strong.
“There’s going to be less hype than normal because people aren’t waiting to know what’s going to happen,” predicts Katie Dooley, first-year arts student at the University of Alberta and long-time Harry Potter fan.
She said that prior to the release of the final book, many eager fans would analyze the movies to develop theories as to what would happen later in the series. She says she had, for example, known the character Kreature would play an important role in the seventh book because of Rowling’s insistence he be present in the fifth film.
“I’ll still go out and see [Half-Blood Prince] and I’m sure it will still gross lots and lots of money but now that the books are gone, there’s no new fan base being generated.”
The upcoming film follows young wizard Harry’s struggles in his sixth year at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry as the evil Voldemort and his minions inflict terror on Britain’s wizard and non-magic populations. Harry, heralded as “the Chosen One” destined to restore peace, is taken under Headmaster Dumbledore’s wing and prepared for the rapidly approaching final battle.
The sixth film was originally set to debut Nov. 21, 2008 but, in an August 2008 announcement, president and chief operating officer of Warner Brothers Alan Horn said this date would be pushed back nearly eight months to July 17, 2009.
In his announcement Horn said the change was for two reasons. Firstly, Warner Bros. hopes to duplicate the success of the fifth Potter film which also had a July release and, secondly, because the studio had suffered due to the writer’s strike, which “change[d] the competitive landscape for 2009 and offer[ed] new windows of opportunity that [Warner Brothers] wanted to take advantage of.”
Three months before the July release, Warner Bros. announced the film’s release would be moved two days earlier to July 15, a Wednesday. This change did not come as a huge surprise to many fans that had seen the same thing happen with the July 2007 release of Order of the Phoenix to give the film a head start on a competitive movie weekend.
The sixth installment of the Potter septology is directed by David Yates, who also directed Order of the Phoenix and is currently working on seventh film Deathly Hallows. Steve Kloves, who wrote the scripts for the first four Potter films, has returned after a brief break to adapt the sixth book to the screen. The original cast, joined by a handful of new faces, has returned for Half-Blood Prince to ensure the continuity of the series.
Warner Bros. released the third and final trailer of Half-Blood Prince April 16. Clocking in at two minutes 20 seconds, this trailer ties in many plot elements and reveals new footage.
The dark, action-packed feel of the trailer makes the film’s PG rating surprising.
Earlier this year, the sixth film was given a PG rating for “scary images, some violence, language and mild sensuality” from the Motion Picture Association in America. This was especially shocking given that the last two films were rated PG-13. Although the battle of Hogwarts has been removed from Half-Blood Prince so as to avoid repetition when that battle occurs in the seventh film, the sixth Potter installment is still marked by death and destruction. Death Eater attacks, cursed students and enchanted dead bodies, all illustrated in the trailer, seem more foreboding than the rating implies.
As fans ready themselves for the release of Half-Blood Prince, Warner Bros. continues filming for Deathly Hallows, which began in February 2009. The final work in the Potter septology will be released as two separate films, the first part coming out Nov. 19, 2010 and the second July 15, 2011.