I don’t understand the rage exploding over the Harry Potter delay. More precisely, I suppose I should say I don’t understand the depth of the rage.

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince was originally scheduled for November, but Warner Bros. has just decided to push it back to June for scheduling purposes.

Is it annoying? Yeah. Is it a personal affront? Not so much.

Maybe I’m jaded, having been through this with movies like Stardust and Serenity, not to mention Sci-Fi Channel’s insane scheduling system that basically treats each “season” as two 10-episode seasons and splits them across what might as well be two years…or, going further back, PTEN’s insistence on holding back the last 4 or 5 episodes of each Babylon 5 season until the following fall, every single year to the point where TNT, after picking up the final season, did the same thing. Pathology got postponed twice, then pulled off the schedule entirely before it finally hit theaters nearly a year after the original release date.

Or maybe it’s just that I like the Harry Potter books better than the movies.

It’s not like it’s been taken off the schedule indefinitely. It’ll still get a theatrical release. I can’t think of any at the moment, but I’ve had movies I really wanted to see get stuck on a shelf, finished, for years. Some of them eventually surfaced as direct-to-DVD releases.

And they’re not delaying production on Deathly Hallows. The actors will still be well within the standard Hollywood “teenager” age range by the time they finish playing 17-year-olds in the final film.

So I can understand being annoyed, but I don’t understand the letter-writing, the petitions, the plans to boycott the film — yes, there are fans who intend to boycott the film if they have to wait for it.

*sigh* I’d better go over to Newsarama and see how crazy the thread about Final Crisis #4 being delayed 2 weeks has gotten. Actually, no, I shouldn’t. I should get some sleep instead.

P.S. Anyone else think that “HP Rebellion” would be a great name for a computer?