Harry Potter And The Half-Blood Prince, we do believe you’ve stumbled upon a clever new tactic.

Despite being the worst-received movie of the Harry Potter franchise, Harry Potter And The Half-Blood Prince looks set to become the most successful movie in the franchise’s history, topping the weekend box office by some margin.

So the worse a Harry Potter film is, the better it does. That’s great news, especially for those of us who wanted part two of Harry Potter And The Deathly Hallows to feature nothing but Harry Potter staring at a shoebox for three hours and then meekly farting.

Out of the way, ropey movie spin-offs of 1960s TV shows! Stand back, tedious and slightly racist-seeming giant robots! Shove over, um, that Fatal Attraction rip-off that Beyonce did! Harry Potter And The Half-Blood Prince is here, and it might just become the biggest US weekend box office hit of the year so far, taking almost $160 million in its first five days.

And that bodes well for Harry Potter And The Deathly Hallows, because that’s got everything that Harry Potter And The Half-Blood Prince had, and more. And by ‘and more’ we mean ‘and an owl getting graphically murdered’. But who doesn’t love a bit of owl-murder, eh? Here’s the weekend box office top five…

1 – Harry Potter And The Half-Blood Prince (Spoiler alert – the half-blood prince in Harry Potter And The Half Blood Prince is actually Prince. He kills Dumbledore with the funk. Or something. Let’s not pretend that we’re interested in seeing or reading anything about this ever. Our way is better) $79,475,000

2 - Ice Age: Dawn Of The Dinosaurs (Dawn Of The Dinosaurs apparently refers to a period of prehistorical time, and not the rough girl we went to school with called Dawn who had scaly skin and spiny humps across her back. And apparently that’s not grounds for a refund. Bastards) $17,700,000

3 - Transformers: Revenge Of The Fallen (Hands up who else was disappointed when The Fallen was revealed to be a robot rather than an army of brittle-boned pensioners who just spent three days laying at the foot of their stairs because their personal alarm pendants had run out of batteries? No? Just us?) $13,750,000

4 – Bruno (A gigantic drop for last week’s weekend box office number one. Maybe talking urethras aren’t the future of cinema after all. Disappointing) $8,374,000

5 - The Hangover (Seven weeks. The Hangover has been in the weekend box office for seven poxy weeks now. Someone put it out of its misery, please. That bad film with Katherine Heigl in, we’re counting on you) $8,315,000

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It’s fair to say that if you’re gay, Protestant or a follower of any other religion apart from Christianity, then The Pope will blow raspberries at you.

It’s the job of The Pope – otherwise known as God’s right hand man – to tell us we’re all living in deep sin and will burn in hell.

Apart from pestering people to not wear condoms, The Pope doesn’t really have much in common with young people. You won’t see him in line at the kebab shop after dancing away at a seven hour rave. However, you could see him holding up the lines at the local cinema as queues to see the latest Harry Potter flick.

We imagine that it’s quite difficult for The Pope to get out during the daytime. With an army of followers who are actually real and not just porn spam on Twitter, he’d be recognised everywhere he went, making it impossible for him to nip down the off license for a crate of Peroni and packet of pork scratchings. He’ll have angel-like minders to get things for him, but where’s the fun in that?

Confined to the inner walls of The Vatican where he does nothing but read the Bible and build crosses out of balsa wood, we imagine The Pope is bound to get a little bit bored. But any of his extracurricular activities would need to be at least semi-related to Christianity. So no Babestation for The Pope.

If we were The Pope, we’d start to write a rival religious text, adding subtle differences such as giving Jesus chainsaws for arms and Moses the ability to breathe fire. It would instantly bring a wave of new followers to Christianity.

Sadly, The Pope turned to Harry bloody Potter instead. As we all know, the Harry Potter series has been a worldwide success for JK Rowling. After destroying a small forest in order to print the millions of copies of books, there are now also lunchboxes, pencil cases and other pointless pieces of tat covered in Harry Potter’s wizardy face.

However, when The Pope sat down with his hotdog and diet coke, he was in for a nasty surprise. All this hocus pocus of making potions in a lab, flying around on a broomstick and generally having fun shocked him so much he dropped his half-eaten penis-shaped snack! This isn’t the Christian way at all. Subsequently the following papal statement was issued about Harry Potter:

“The character was evil and born of “the devil.”

Well that isn’t very good is it? Surely his influential comments would drive away tons of people from seeing the film. Oh wait, it didn’t. Never mind, at least the comments made for an interesting Grumpy Old Men audition tape if nothing more. But that was then – times have changed. Now The Pope loves Harry Potter so much that he’d like to make contact with Daniel Radcliffe via a hug. Which definitely wouldn’t be gay. According to the Vatican newspaper L’Osservatore Romano:

“Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince is the best of the series yet. The Vatican say that the film “made the age-old debate over good v evil crystal clear” and said it had the “correct balance” not exhibited in the other films.”

Why couldn’t The Pope have banned the film adaptation of Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code instead? Everyone in the world would have been united in happiness then. Not just pissed off cinema goers.

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Harry Potter And The Half-Blood Prince is released next week, and it’s a hugely important film in the series.

No, not because of the drama. And not because of Hermione and Ron’s developing romance. It’s because, finally, Emma Watson is legitimately old enough for grotty old perverts to drool over her every time she accidentally flashes a portion of her knickers for a millisecond in public. Which she did this week at the Harry Potter premiere, in fact.

But still, it was a one-off mistake and every has moved on from… what? Emma Watson is still talking about it? Yeesh.

There’s a lot riding on Harry Potter And The Half-Blood Prince, you know. It’s the first Harry Potter film to be released since JK Rowling published the last book in the series. Will people still be interested now that they can just walk into a bookshop, look at the last page of Harry Potter And The Deathly Hallows and see that Harry doesn’t die in the end?

Early reports suggest that they will, but that hasn’t stopped the main Harry Potter castmembers from going on an all-out media assault just to be sure. And by ‘all-out media assault’ we mean that Emma Watson slapped her grundies out for the photographers this week, which is more or less the same thing.

Now, admittedly, Emma Watson only flashed her knickers by accident – and they were probably on show for less than a second in total – but to look at the newspapers this week you’d think that she’d spent an hour and a half strutting up and down the Harry Potter And The Half-Blood Prince red carpet thrusting her be-knicked pelvis into the faces of crying children to the sound of the music from that Morecambe & Wise sketch.

But that’s to be expected – Emma Watson is a pretty young girl over the age of consent, and if it isn’t the paparazzi’s job to mortify girls like her by seizing upon their every mistake then we don’t know what is. Plus, it doesn’t matter what Emma Watson does – even if she stripped naked and punched a pensioner unconscious, most of us would just be relieved that she isn’t going out with Johnny Borrell from Razorlight any more.

Still, at least it’s all in the past now. At least she doesn’t keep bringing it up every time she goes on television. Oh wait, yes she does. Fox reports:

When television host David Letterman pointed out the faux-pas on “The Late Show,” a blushing Emma replied: “This was a small wardrobe malfunction, that happens. At least I’m wearing underwear,” the 19-year-old star added, before hanging her head in her hands to say she’s “still learning” this stuff.

Look, nice try Emma. But accidental or not, this whole Harry Potter nudity trend needs to be stopped immediately. First it was Harry Potter’s penis, then it was JK Rowlings’ bra, and now it’s your knick-knacks. Enough’s enough. Because, seriously, the next logical step here is Rupert Grint in a mankini, and there can’t be a single person on the face of the Earth who’d honestly want to see that.

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At least we’re told that it’s a trailer for Harry Potter And The Half-Blood Prince. Having watched it a few times, we’re pretty sure that it’s actually a trailer for one of the following:

Harry Potter And The Fascinating Geological Formations

Harry Potter And The Heavy-Handed Jesus Allegory

Harry Potter And The Spooky Crops

Harry Potter And Another Bloody Quidditch Sequence

Lord Of The Rings

Anyway, will Harry Potter survive the threat against him in Harry Potter And The Half-Blood Prince? Yes. Yes he will. We checked.

Harry Potter And The Half-Blood Prince is the penultimate Harry Potter book, and although we snuck a look at the last page of Harry Potter And The Deathly Hallows once and therefore know exactly how everything ends, it still promises to be an exciting revenue stream rollercoaster of a movie experience.

So here it is, the brand new Harry Potter And The Half-Blood Prince trailer…

Now, we know that in all the excitement the Harry Potter And The Half-Blood Prince trailer just looked like a confusing jumble of words and pictures, so we’ve taken the time to decode it for for. That’s why we know that in Harry Potter And The Half-Blood Prince:

*Dumbledore comes out as a homosexual. He has to. Look at that scarf.

*There’s a creepy little kid who either turns out to be Voldemort or Darth Vader.

*Gandalf’s in it.

*In Hogwarts, they keep memories in little glass dildos.

*We discover what the other half of the half-blood prince is made out of. SPOILER ALERT – it’s marmalade.

You’re welcome.

We’re so excited about Harry Potter And The Half-Blood Prince that we’re literally ticking off every second until its release on a giant blackboard, plus we’ve started to physically assault anyone we see who a) isn’t talking about Harry Potter And The Half Blood Prince or b) doesn’t look like they’re thinking about it. Even if they’re old. That’s how much we care.

So imagine how delighted we were when we got sent images of Harry Potter, Draco Malfoy and that old wizard bloke (Gandalf?) taken from a brand new range of Harry Potter And The Half-Blood Prince stationery. How delighted were we? Boner delighted! And you will be too, provided you’re sexually aroused by the sight of a) stationery and b) schoolboys. But who isn’t these days, huh?

Look, we know. Thinking about another movie so soon after The Dark Knight feels like cheating. Ever single other movie made before or after will feel like watching a crude cartoon of a dancing horse now because The Dark Knight is so epic and Shakespearean and blah blah blah.

No other movies can compete at the moment, not even November’s Harry Potter And The Half-Blood Prince. But that’ll change, because Harry Potter And The Half-Blood Prince is just starting to amp up its marketing.

True, The Dark Knight may have benefited from one of its stars dying right after giving the performance of a lifetime, and by another of its stars going a bit mental at his clownmother, but Harry Potter’s got a trick or two up his sleeve as well.

Just last month we saw the first leaked photo from Harry Potter And The Half-Blood Prince – a photo that was about four-fifths wall. Take that Batman! What’s that? You want some more? Fine, then how about this – a bunch of scans from what appears to be some kind of Harry Potter And The Half-Blood Prince kiddy diary thing.

Brought to our attention by Spanish Harry Potter website BlogHogwarts.com, these scans are some of the most profoundly important images our eyes have ever had the privilege of processing. In years to come, future generations will look at that one blank notebook page with the little picture of Malfoy in the corner and regard it with the same wonder and awe as we do with Stonehenge or the Aztec pyramids.

And we’ll be staggered – absolutely staggered – if the picture of Harry Potter crouching slightly and looking a bit narked off that accompanies the May diary page doesn’t get used as a cure for cancer once scientists have properly learnt how to fully harness its power.

Honestly, the majesty of these images have left us terrified of what Harry Potter And The Half-Blood Prince merchandise they’ll show us next. A mug? A pencil case? No, please, not a pencil case – our mortal brains can only take so much… so much beauty.

Which is why we’re so thrilled that the scene looks set to make it to the forthcoming movie adaptation of Harry Potter And The Half-Blood Prince, judging by the newly-released images from the film. It’s been captured perfectly – Harry Potter is there, the wall is there and – best of all – the blank look is there! Let’s hope the filmmakers do as much justice to the Harry Potter And The Half-Blood Prince scene where Ron Weasley scratches his cheek briefly! We’re so excited!

Oh, we’re just kidding – about the wall-standing, thing, that is, not about not being excited about Harry Potter And The Half-Blood Prince. Although we’re not. However, photos from the movie are starting to crop up all over the internet.

Cinematical has the wall-leaning shot and one of Zack from Saved By The Bell talking to Liam Gallagher, while BlogHogwarts has shots of Harry Potter looking in a drawer, holding a book and sitting around a table, with a shot of Liam Gallagher looking all ticked off at Zack from Saved By The Bell. It looks epic.

Seriously, never mind the kerfuffle about Harry Potter kissing a girl in the last film – Harry Potter And The Half-Blood Prince looks set to have all the controversial book-holding, drawer-looking, wall-leaning action you could ever wish for! Fasten your seatbelts everyone!

More Harry Potter images after the jump…