Harry Potter: Too naked for holiday season?
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No wonder movie studios are petrified of the media! Every time a studio moves a big tentpole’s release date, the conpiracy theorists surface, speculating all sorts of dark, quasi-satanistic motives. The chatterers are chattering again with the news that Warners has pulled ‘Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince’ from its Nov. 21 date, pushing it to July 17. The blogosphere has treated the move with all sorts of raised eyebrows.
But nobody has floated a more preposterous theory than Foxnews showbiz blogger Roger Friedman, who proposed today the real reason he believes the movie got the bump: Warners is petrified that family movie fans will freak out when they discover that ‘Potter’ star Daniel Radcliffe is appearing on stage this fall in New York in ‘Equus,’ a play that -- horrors! -- requires a bit of occasional nudity. Putting on his Inspector Clouseau investigator’s cap, Friedman assumes the worst:
‘Radcliffe appears naked in the play, on stage, and has sex in it as well. That’s not the image Warner Bros. wants associated with bespectacled Harry, who remains chaste and virginal. Indeed, posters for ‘Equus’ are up all over New York, of Radcliffe’s naked torso superimposed on a horse’s head. This is not the sort of of thing that’s taught at Hogwarts. For the movie to open on Nov. 21, Radcliffe would have to do publicity entailing answering questions about blinding horses and having sex with them vs. flying around and making potions.’
Putting aside the obvious -- any 10-year-old could’ve told Roger that by the time of ‘Half Blood Prince,’ the Harry Potter protagonists are quite well aware of the opposite sex -- the theory is hilariously New York-ocentric, as if Middle America were really riveted by what was happening on one stage in midtown Manhattan. There’s a more obvious explanation for the move: If you glance at Warner’s schedule for 2009, it has a thin summer, with only one real potential blockbuster (‘Terminator Salvation’) on the slate. Putting ‘Half-Blood Prince’ in the summer, where it could perhaps make even more money, beefs up a potential weak summer slate. It also takes some of the pressure off this fall’s release schedule, which is so jampacked with product that, as Warners distribution chief Dan Fellman told me the other day, has more movies than most studios release in an entire year.
Having made more moola with ‘The Dark Knight’ this summer than it ever had imagined possible, Warners can afford to bump its next meal ticket into another fiscal year, where it can keep all those corporate coffers nicely balanced with blockbuster product. I like a good conspiracy theory as much the next person, but sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.
Photo: Warner Bros. Photo: Daniel Radcliffe in ‘Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince.’