Warner Bros. Pictures announced their decision to postpone the release date of "Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince" to next year’s summer on July 17th.

The news was made public by Alan Horn, President and Chief Operating Officer, Warner Bros, who said in a statement that the reasons for the postponement are twofold. The first reason would be that the summer would be the perfect time for a family tent pole release and the other was linked to the repercussions of the writers' strike.

“We agreed the best strategy was to move 'Half-Blood Prince' to July, where it perfectly fills the gap for a major tent pole release for mid-summer," said Horn.

The group’s president, Jeff Robinov, assured Harry Potter fans that the production of the successful series is right on track. The post-production process on “Half-Blood Prince” was accomplished on time and the change of the release date will not affect the production of the two-part “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows” at all.

“The good news for them is that the gap will now be shortened between ‘Half-Blood Prince’ and the first part of ‘Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows,'" Robinov added.

However, some Hollywood insiders linked the film’s postponement to the nude wand which appears on billboards all over New York. Daniel Radcliffe's nude image would surely conflict with the innocence of young wizard Harry.

If Warner Bros. would have launched the new movie of the Harry Potter series in November, as initially planned, it would have directly clashed with the period of the promotion of Radcliffe's Peter Shaffer play Equus, in which the young actor has sex and appears naked on stage. That’s an image Warner Bros. definitely doesn’t want to be associated with Harry Potter.

Nevertheless, the theory according to which the movie was delayed simply because a dominant summer blockbuster is far better than a dominant fall blockbuster (which translates into more money), seems to be the more credible one.