Harry Potter Officially Gets Hacked To Bits

Like a holiday romance with a pretty Lithuanian girl who naively accepts your false claims of being a powerful blogger as truth, we don't want Harry Potter to end.

OK, that's a lie. We do want Harry Potter to end. Sometimes we wish that Harry Potter had never been born at all. But the Warner Bros big cheeses who rely on Harry Potter to keep them in private jets and man-made vagina-shaped residential islands don't want Harry Potter to end.

And what they say goes, because it's just been made official that Harry Potter And The Deathly Hallows will be turned into two separate movies. Now Harry Potter And The Deathly Hallows will be released in November 2010, with its sequel Harry Potter And The Even More Deathlier Hallows That Make The First Lot Of Deathly Hallows Look A Bit Wimpy And Shit will follow in May 2011.

The 'nine and a half' tactic is key in the fields of teaching and parenting. You threaten a naughty child with violence and give them until the count of then to behave. But then you get to nine and they're still defying you. Reaching ten means that you're either going to have concede authority to a screaming infant or actually punch it and live with the guilt for the rest of your life. So, suddenly, in a desperate attempt to draw it out, you blurt out "nine and a half" instead of "ten." 

Harry Potter's studio Warner Bros knows the 'nine and a half' tactic too, because it's just announced the biggest nine and a half of cinema history - it's splitting Harry Potter And The Deathly Hallows in two.

The Harry Potter movies have been good for Warner Bros - each of the five made so far has a spot in the top 20 highest-grossing movies of all time. But the thing is, Harry Potter And The Deathly Hallows is the last Harry Potter book. Once that's been turned into a film there's nowhere left to go, unless Warner Bros decides to go with that unauthorised Harry Potter Vs The Dinosaurs On The Planet Of Tits spec script that we sent them last week.

Well, not quite nowhere to go, because Warner Bros has decided to follow through on threats it made in January and turn Harry Potter And The Deathly Hallows into two separate movies. But it's not because they want to con the public out of twice as much money as before, oh no. As Harry Potter actor Daniel Radcliffe - who's just made twice as much money from Harry Potter And The Deathly Hallows as he thought he would - explains, it's because the book's quite long.

The Los Angeles Times reports:

"I think it's the only way you can do it, without cutting out a huge portion of the book. There have been compartmentalized subplots in the other books that have made them easier to cut — although those cuts were still to the horror of some fans — but the seventh book doesn't really have any subplots. It's one driving, pounding story from the word go." … Alan Horn, president and chief operating officer of Warner Bros. Entertainment, [said] "This way, we have an extra hour and a half, at least, to celebrate what this franchise has been and do justice to all the words and ideas that Jo has put in the amazing story," Horn said. "This is the end of the story too. We want to celebrate it. We want to give a full meal." 

And, you know, if they can give a full meal and make a cheeky extra $900 million at the same time, well then that's just dandy.

Also, the matter of who'll direct the Harry Potter And The Deathly Hallow movies has been cleared up. Although reports suggested that Steven Spielberg and Guillermo Del Toro wanted a shot at Harry Potter, directing duties will fall to David Yates, who'll have ratcheted up his tally of Harry Potter movies to four by the time the final Harry Potter And The Deathly Hallows movie comes out.

That's if the second Harry Potter And The Deathly Hallows movie really is the last one - splitting the movies is such a license to print money that we wouldn't be surprised if the second half of the second movie becomes a new film. And there's probably six or seven movies to be made of the lame epilogue bit at the end where it turns out that Harry Potter doesn't die.

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'Deathly Hallows' films are scheduled to be released in November 2010 and May 2011. - LA Times