Studio Delays Movie, Gets Death Threats; 'I Hope You Choke on Your Own Saliva'Jean Fink, a 51-year-old Los Angeles artist who also works as an administrative assistant, was so distraught after a night of fitful sleep that she dashed off a scathing message to the man who'd betrayed her. "I can't breath amymore [sic] because you just ripped out my heart," she wrote in an Aug. 15 email.
Her tormentor: Alan Horn, president of Time Warner Inc.'s Warner Bros. On Aug. 14, Mr. Horn announced the unusual decision to delay releasing the newest installment of the Harry Potter film series, initially set for release in November, for another eight months. "What he was doing was screwing up the world," fumes Ms. Fink. "I wasn't p- like I was going to go kill the guy, but I was angry. And I'm not done yet."
After Warner Brothers announced it was moving the release date for "Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince" from November 2007 to July 2008, executives' inboxes were flooded with emails from angry fans. Read some examples. Some emails have been edited for clarity.
To a world of wand-wielding Harry Potter loyalists, the 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.
Victim of Success
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.
But die-hard fans, sometimes called "Potterheads," weren't appeased. Kerry McGee, a 24-year-old office administrator from Townsville, Australia, says Mr. Horn's attempt to create a positive spin on the delay "put fuel on the fire." In response to Mr. Horn's apology she sent 30 angry letters to Warner Bros. in bright red envelopes -- an allusion to "howlers," a magical kind of hate mail in the Potter world that screams loudly at the recipient and explodes violently if left unopened.
A studio spokeswoman declined to comment on Mr. Horn's behalf for the story, saying that Mr. Horn's apology spoke for itself. People at the studio say that while they knew that tampering with the Harry Potter release date could stir up dark forces, the studio never expected the current onslaught.
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.
Crass Admission
An eight-month delay for a big-budget movie is highly unusual. But because Warner Bros. elected not to associate the Harry Potter movies with many corporate sponsors, "Half-Blood Prince" is less encumbered with the kind of deadlines typically faced by major Hollywood movie releases. (The film is delaying some ancillary products, like Electronic Arts Inc.'s "Half-Blood Prince" videogame.)
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.
"You are blasted, greedy, money-driven executive b-," wrote Lauryn Adams, a student at George Washington University in Washington, D.C.
Anthropological experts on Potterheads aren't surprised by the venom. "A lot of our fans live in a fantasy world that they share with hundreds of thousands of other people -- so when some people get angry, they feed off each other," says Melissa Anelli, who runs fan site "The Leaky Cauldron" and has written a book about the Harry Potter phenomenon that comes out this November.
To appease fans, the studio could release some additional teaser or content, suggests Andrew Sims, who helps run MuggleNet, a fan site named after the Potter term for someone lacking magical powers. "If something new came out, everybody would forget about it. But I got to be honest, a little part of me died inside when I heard about the delay," the 19-year-old college student said in a telephone interview.
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?"
"Harry Potter is for the fans, he's for the underdogs, and so am I," Ms. Fink says. "I won't stop fighting this."
By: Lauren Schuker
Wall Street Journal; September 8, 2008
