That's the new two-minute trailer for Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince below, which Warner Bros. is hoping will help stave off death threats from fans who are still resentful that the film was pushed back to next July from its original release date of next week. (Just think! If it weren't for that, you'd be seeing the film less than seven days from now!) We featured it earlier today in Trailer Park, but come on -- a Harry Potter trailer deserves special attention.



One thing that's notable is that there is no reference, not even a hint, to the Big Surprising Terrible Thing that occurs near the end of the book and that presumably also occurs in the movie. (Although it would be funny if it didn't happen in the movie. "Oh, yeah, So-and-So's death? Eh, we cut it. No room. Maybe in the next film.") It's not exactly a well-kept secret anymore -- hard to do that when the book has sold 65 million copies -- but I appreciate that the trailer keeps a lid on it for those who watch the movies but don't read the books.

For those who have read the book, though, the trailer has glimpses of things that surely relate to the Big Surprising Terrible Thing: a shot of Draco Malfoy looking panicked and sickly, a shot of Snape firing his wand, etc. The scenes of Death Eater attacks on London look great, and I hope the film makes full use of how scary that aspect of the story is. (Magical people fighting each other, meh. Magical people fighting each other and harming innocent bystanders, yikes!)

It's a light weekend at the multiplexes, with just one new wide release to take in. The good news there is that once you're done watching James Bond kill and/or sleep with people, you'll have plenty of time to head to the art houses and see what the independent scene has to offer. The Indie Spotlight is here to round 'em up for you, and there are nine diverse choices opening today: Bohica, A Christmas Tale, Dostana, The Dukes, Faded Memories, House of the Sleeping Beauties, How About You, Slumdog Millionaire, and We Are Wizards.

Here's the lowdown on each of them:

Slumdog Millionaire
What it is: It's the feel-good sensation of the year that has critics raving, that's what! It's about a kid from the streets of Mumbai who somehow makes it to the final round of India's "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire" -- and in particular about the events of his life that brought him there.
What they're saying: Cinematical's Kim Voynar called it Danny Boyle's best film to date when she reviewed it at Telluride. It's rocking a 92% approval rating at Rotten Tomatoes, with an average score of 8.2 out of 10, making it one of the best-reviewed movies of the year. If this movie doesn't make you feel good it must be because your heart is gnarly and cankered.
Where it's playing: New York City (Angelika, Lincoln Plaza), Los Angeles (The Landmark), Chicago (Landmark Century Centre, Century Evanston 18), San Francsico (Embarcadero).
More info: The official site has a list of when it opens in other cities. Expansion starts next week.

Pretty soon, the studios will bring the full court press in terms of marketing their big 2009 blockbusters. We've already seen Warner Bros. and Paramount try to one-up each other with regards to pushing Watchmen and Star Trek, and I've heard debut trailers for X-Men Origins: Wolverine and Night at the Museum 2 are literally right around the corner. Angels & Demons has already shoveled out a teaser, and I'm sure Harry Potter is just waiting for all this Twilight nonsense to go away before he starts bringing the pain. As per usual, we're not even done with 2008, and yet all we seem to care about is 2009. Go figure.

We'll probably run this poll a couple of times prior to the real beginning of the season, but we're curious to see what your radar looks like a few months out. Not all of these films have begun their big push yet, but it'll be interesting to see which ones are your most anticipated based on the very little we've seen so far. Below are, in our opinion, the 18 biggest blockbusters of 2009. If we left off your favorite, feel free to write her in down below. (Oh, and that's an image of my most anticipated blockbuster of 2009 up top.)

A brand spanking new international trailer for Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince has hit the internets, and since the voiceover uses the words "This year ...", one assumes this is an older trailer or one that wasn't meant to arrive until some point in 2009. Nevertheless, there's some new footage here -- some darkness, some romance, some running, some magic and a whole lotta fire. You'll remember how Half-Blood Prince was supposed to come out in just a couple of weeks from now, until Warner Bros. decided to pull a fast one and push the film's release date all the way back to July 17, 2009. With Potter and his cronies out of the way, the teen vamp flick Twilight moved up and has been trying to swipe whatever Potter thunder was left lingering. While Twilight may now own November, this new Potter trailer proves the boy wizard ain't exactly ready to give up his top spot on the teen fantasy totem pole just yet.

Check it out and let us know what you think.

In a world where Don LaFontaine will no longer lend his voice to any trailers, and where floating heads and Photoshop skills are what passes for the 'art' in 'poster art', the prospect of Drew Struzan's retirement is almost too much to bear. The guys over at Ain't It Cool News got the initial news from TheRaider.net, and they get the fact that this makes the sun shine just that much less in this industry of ours.

In a message posted there, Struzan said: "Having been working at not working has produced a guy who could never return to illustration again. It took a lot to attempt the idea of retiring from my 40 years of effort and sacrifice but now that I have, I am delighting in life as never before. I had forgotten how to rest, to smell the proverbial roses and to see the future as opportunity. I am grateful and honored to have had the opportunity to do all the work I did. I am well pleased to have been able to give a gift of beauty and peace through my artwork to so many throughout the world. Now I have laid down the burden and have peace and happiness as the reward for my day's labor."

AICN aptly directs readers to Struzan's official site, and even if they hadn't, I'd advise the same course of action in an attempt to appreciate what iconic images he crafted a career out of.

In what appears to be part of a most thorough campaign to botch Entertainment Weekly's Fall Movie Preview, a recent press release wholly admits that the North American opening of the 22nd James Bond film, Quantum of Solace, back from November 7th to the 14th marks an effort to capitalize on last week's sudden Harry Potter shift.

Although the removal of the 007th from any coming marketing blitz sure is a shame, it does place this film closer to the release of its predecessor, Casino Royale, which opened on November 17, 2006 to the tune of almost $600 million worldwide. Solace will still premiere in the United Kingdom on October 31.

For those keeping track at home, this now leaves Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa and the just now shifted Paul Rudd comedy Role Models on November 7th, and the 14th is now between Bond, Baz Luhrmann's epic drama Australia, and Bernie Mac's final film, Soul Men.

Now, think fast! When does Something of Boris open again?!

It's a lonely day in the neighborhood ....

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince: I'm not sure whether Warner Bros. was prepared for the ridiculous fanboy (and girl) backlash that came with pushing the film's release date back several months to the middle of July, 2009, though it looks like they've re-grouped, dusted themselves off and are preparing to get that marketing machine up and running again. Following a statement from Warners chief Alan Horn (included after the jump) comes word from our friends at Bloghogwarts that Warner Bros. has sent in a new trailer (marked at a minute and a half) to the BBFC for approval. Could this be the studio's version of make-up sex? (PG rated make-up sex, of course.) Only time will tell ...

Inglorious Bastards: These days, when it comes to the cast of Quentin Tarantino's WWII flick Inglorious Bastards, nothing is set in stone (or badass, motherf**king stone, as QT would say). Thus, we want to be real careful about this latest news (via Variety) that Michael Fassbender is "in talks" to join the ensemble cast. Note that he's "in talks", as were a few other guys (Simon Pegg, David Krumholtz, though the latter is still mentioned by the trade) before they dropped out. Though they don't say who he'd be playing, the German-speaking actor would most likely take on the role of badass motherf**king Nazi in charge of total damage ... which sounds about right to me. Fassbender, of course, is best known for his role as Stelios in 300, and is still set to appear opposite Abbie Cornish in Wuthering Heights.

When Warner Bros. announced last Thursday that Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince had been pushed back from Nov. 21 to next July, hardcore fans immediately entered the five stages of nerd grief. So far we've worked our way through denial, anger, semi-literate Internet ranting, and conspiracy-theorizing. All that's left is acceptance, where we go ahead and watch the movie when it comes out next summer and forget any of this ever happened.

In the meantime, several myths about the date change have popped up, and we'd like to help separate fact from fiction.

MYTH #1: Half-Blood Prince was moved because WB was scared of Twilight.
According to some people who are fans of the Twilight novel and pre-fans of the Twilight movie, WB got nervous about Harry Potter coming out just three weeks before the teen-vampire chick flick, fearing it would siphon off too much of Harry's audience.

Most observers believe Twilight will indeed be a hit, but come on. The Harry Potter franchise the most lucrative in film history, with a total worldwide box-office gross so far of $4.5 billion. There's no reason for WB to fear any competition, no matter how formidable. Also, most of Harry Potter's income is from overseas, where Twilight, still largely a U.S. phenomenon, cannot hope to compete.

Plus, if Half-Blood Prince came out Nov. 21 and followed the usual pattern, it would have already made most of its projected income by the time Twilight showed up on Dec. 12 anyway. Three weeks is a huge gap in our modern, front-loaded, it's-all-about-opening-weekend movie culture. If there had only been one week between them, then maybe you'd have something.

For all you Harry Potter fans who are also devoted to a certain series of teen-vampire romance novels, here's something that should help you deal with Thursday's devastating news about Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince being pushed back to next summer. Summit Entertainment announced today that with Harry having vacated the November 21 spot, they're going to fill it with Twilight, bumping it up a full three weeks from its original date of December 12.

While some fans wondered, irrationally, if the Harry Potter move was to get away from Twilight, Summit's CEO says Twilight never had any delusions of being more powerful than the boy wizard at the box office. "With a giant franchise like Harry Potter in the market, we had to stay clear of it," Rob Friedman told Variety -- hence the original date well away from Half-Blood Prince. "Their move created an opportunity to bring the movie to fans three weeks earlier."

Once November 21 opened up, the move was really a no-brainer. As a press release from Summit points out, movie theaters get very crowded around the holidays, and Twilight will be able to open on far more screens on November 21 than it could have on December 12. Now it'll be opening the Friday before Thanksgiving, too, which is nearly always a plus. Its only competition will be Disney's animated Bolt. The only loser here is Entertainment Weekly, whose Fall Movie Preview is now wrong again, before most readers have even seen it. (Or, from another point of view, now that issue is even more of a collector's item.)

What do you say? Are you excited about getting Twilight sooner? To those of you who have been sending Warner Bros. wrathful messages about the Harry Potter move, does this quell your anger somewhat? Will you at least be able to live and function and carry on?

This is the cover of the new Entertainment Weekly, which hit newsstands today, approximately 24 hours after its top story became outdated. As you've heard by now, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince is no longer the most-anticipated movie of the fall; it's now the most-anticipated movie of July 17, 2009. Whoops.

This bit of unfortunate timing is particularly cruel given that Entertainment Weekly and Harry Potter distributor Warner Bros. are both owned by Time Warner Inc. As EW's Jeff Giles writes in a must-read entry on the magazine's blog, "EW and Warner Bros. share a parent company, but they clearly do not share, you know, important friggin' information." (For the record, Cinematical is owned by Weblogs Inc., which is owned by AOL, which is also owned by Time Warner. But if Entertainment Weekly isn't in the loop on major corporate decisions, you can imagine how out of it we are. We're like the distant hillbilly cousins who show up at the family reunion, have no idea who anyone is, and gorge ourselves on pie.)

Considering EW is Time Warner's flagship entertainment magazine, you'd think someone at corporate would have given them a heads-up before their Fall Movie Preview went to press. While the announcement about the date change wasn't made until Thursday, surely the execs at Warners didn't just wake up that morning and say, "Hey, let's move Harry Potter today!" Surely the decision was at least a few days in the making.

On the other hand, it did seem to happen pretty suddenly. Giles points out that Half-Blood Prince's teaser trailer (complete with the November release date) is attached to Star Wars: The Clone Wars, in theaters today. If Warners had made the decision in time, they'd have nipped that in the bud, too. So either the decision really wasn't made until yesterday, or else some family members are too good at keeping secrets from one another.

Thanksgiving just got a lot less magical. Warner Bros. has announced that Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, originally scheduled for release on Nov. 21, has been pushed back to July 17. As in 2009. As in ELEVEN MONTHS AWAY! It's enough to make you utter an unforgivable curse, such as "Avada Kedavra!" or "What the f***?!"

A film's release date being moved back is usually a sign that the production is in trouble, but that doesn't seem to be the case here. For one thing, the production on Half-Blood Prince is pretty much finished already, and it's not like the director, producers, or actors were inexperienced screw-ups. No, the date change in this case seems to be purely strategic. Said top WB honcho Alan Horn in a press release:

"Our reasons for shifting Half-Blood Prince to summer are twofold: We know the summer season is an ideal window for a family tent-pole release.... Additionally, like every other studio, we are still feeling the repercussions of the writers' strike, which impacted the readiness of scripts for other films, changing the competitive landscape for 2009 and offering new windows of opportunity that we wanted to take advantage of.... [Half-Blood Prince] perfectly fills the gap for a major tent-pole release for mid-summer."

There are two ways of reading that. One is that WB won't have anything else PG-13 and family-friendly ready for mid-summer, so Half-Blood Prince has been called in to save the day. The other is that WB is well aware that the other studios' summer plans were screwed up by the strike, so they've moved Harry Potter into position to take full advantage of that weakness. Both are probably at least partially true, and it's a pretty savvy move in either case.

I recall reading about real-life experiments with invisibility a couple years back, and I could have sworn I blogged about them here on Cinematical. But I must have decided to keep Harry Potter fans from getting their hopes up, despite the fact that the original article I read had specifically mentioned Potter's invisibility cloak. Plus, I must have been hesitant to attempt to explain the science behind it.

Well, now that more news has come out about the development of materials that may be able to render people and other three-dimensional objects invisible, I figure it's time to get excited. Now we can definitely wander around Hogwarts after dark without being spotted by Argus Filch. Or, for the grown up kids, you can potentially sneak into the girls' locker room. Just beware that these real-life cloaks probably don't work so well in such foggy conditions.

Devout fans of Stephanie Meyer's "Twilight Saga" might not appreciate the comparisons, but it's easy to see from the outside that the books are being treated by the entertainment industry like the second coming of Harry Potter. Only with vampires instead of wizards. Yet despite all the excitement surrounding tomorrow's release (or tonight's release, if you're a real fan) of Meyer's fourth and final installment, "Breaking Dawn," I don't see the series really being as successful. I can't imagine a whole new Twilight-themed music genre forming, for instance ("vampire rock" would just be goth rock, anyway). And even with all the screams heard in Hall H last week during the Twilight panel at Comic-Con, I don't believe the movie is going to be anywhere as big as Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone (I see it maybe clearing half of Sorcerer Stone's $318 mill. domestic take).

If the first Twilight movie is big enough to warrant further adaptations of the Saga, the franchise could possibly see itself being compared to Harry Potter in another way, at least if Meyer has any say in the way "Breaking Dawn" makes it to the big screen. Similar to how the seventh and final Potter novel, "Deathly Hallows" is being split in half for two separate films (the first part will be released in December 2010, with the second part arriving six months later), Meyer tells MTV that there needs to be two separate movies made out of the final book in her series. And she knows exactly where the story should be split (see if you can figure out where while reading the book this week), which makes me wonder why she didn't just write five books rather than four.

To hear the suggestion straight from the author's mouth, check out MTV's interview with Meyer after the jump.

As both a cinephile and a candy freak, I get excited anytime there's a new movie-themed confection (as you can see from this Cinematical Seven from last Halloween). While some tie-ins are less tasty than others -- it's no wonder that the movie theater I worked at had trouble pushing Bertie Bott's Every Flavor Beans at the concession stand -- everything is worth sampling. And from time to time, some candies, such as the Star Wars prequel-inspired dark chocolate M&Ms and this summer's Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull-themed Snickers Adventures Bar, end up being far better than the movie they're helping to market.

Being apparently one of the few people who has no interest in Twilight whatsoever, I'm sure to feel the same way about a new tie-in from Godiva, which MTV Movies Blog excitedly spotlighted this morning. It's actually more related to the books, as its packaging features the cover of the first book in Stephanie Meyers' popular series. And Barnes and Noble will begin selling them tomorrow in connection with this weekend's release of the fourth book of the Twilight Saga, "Breaking Dawn." However, you could certainly stock up now (they're probably a limited edition item), so that you can sneak one into the cinema each of those hundreds of times you'll be sitting through Twilight the movie this December. Or maybe a smart theater chain will sell them at their concession stand, to avoid having fans smuggle in contraband candy (if you know me well, you know I don't like to encourage sneaking snacks). Keep in mind, though, that there's nothing entirely special about this bar, except that it has a special Twilight-themed sleeve. Otherwise it's just simply Godiva's boring (yet delicious) old milk chocolate bar.