To a world of wand-wielding Harry Potter loyalists, the Warner Bros. studio executive had crossed to the dark side. Within hours of Warner Bros.'s decision to postpone the release of "Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince" to next July, hate mail began to pour into the studio. An online petition expressing fans' disgust with the decision garnered more than 45,000 signatures. The studio says it even received death threats. "I hope you choke on your own saliva," snarled one fan in an email.
While executives' private email addresses circulated via the Web, angry homemade videos were being uploaded onto YouTube. In one, Greg and Penny Gershman overlaid their own subtitles to a German film about the final days of Adolf Hitler. "How am I supposed to get my Potter fix now!" Hitler violently shouts, according to the new subtitles, when told of the delay by one of his officials. He adds: "We are going to make Warner Brothers suffer."
The withering attacks over a family-friendly franchise like Potter show how the nature of fan uprisings has grown increasingly hostile. Thanks to the Web, angry fans can arm themselves with the latest information and speedily deliver profane brain dumps straight into executive email boxes. When CBS canceled its drama "Jericho" last year, fans deluged its network with vicious emails and a cavalcade of nuts -- a sly reference to a word used in the finale. As a result, CBS changed its mind and ordered up new episodes.
It's an unpleasant new challenge for the entertainment industry, which is more used to quaint letter-writing campaigns like the one that briefly saved the television show "Star Trek" from being canceled in the late 1960s.
But Warner Bros. is in some ways a victim of the same forces that drove its success. The five prior Potter films have grossed almost $4.5 billion in world-wide box-office revenue, making the series the biggest franchise in history. In the past, Warner Bros. has invited staffers of Potter fan Web sites to movie premieres to help whip up hysteria ahead of upcoming movie releases. With its transgression, Warner Bros. inadvertently unleashed this powerful force against itself.
On Aug. 19, Mr. Horn issued a formal apology assuring fans that the studio "would certainly never do anything to hurt any of the films." He also noted a "silver lining," which is that "Half-Blood Prince" would now open closer to the studio's seventh planned Harry Potter film, due out in November 2010.
Potter fans felt particularly betrayed by the studio for giving them such late notice about the delay. In late July, just two weeks before the announcement, the studio released a trailer for the film, which explores the teen wizards' early struggles with romance and promises the shattering death of a major character. And Time Warner's Entertainment Weekly had just put Harry Potter star Daniel Radcliffe on its cover.
Many fans felt Warner Bros.'s stated reason for the delay -- that the film would make a bigger splash in the middle of summer -- was a crass admission that the studio cares only about bigger box-office returns. "YOU just slapped the face of EVERY Harry Potter Fan and told us you don't care what we want -- you only want our money!" stormed Natalie DeGennaro, a 50-year-old electronic-design engineer who lives in Hillsborough, N.C., in an email she sent to Time Warner Chief Executive Jeffrey Bewkes, Warner Bros. Chairman Barry Meyer and other executives.
Some think the outsized reaction could actually be a boon for the studio. Steve Sansweet, who runs fan relations for George Lucas's Lucasfilm Ltd., says "Warner Bros. should be delighted. Sure, they have a problem on their hands, but they are also seeing the passion of their fans. The real problem comes when you have fans that don't give a damn."
The fans, however, are still angry. Many are still signing petitions planning protests and uploading angry videos to YouTube. Ms. Fink, the artist and administrative assistant, recently stood outside Warner Bros.'s Burbank lot with a large sign. "Dear Mr. Horn," she scrawled in red marker. "You will forever be known as 'The man who changed Harry Potter's release date.' Are you happy now?"
Source: http://online.wsj.com
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