Fans strike back over Harry Potter delay

Alan Horn, the president of Warner Bros, is paying dearly for his decision to delay the release of the latest Harry Potter movie, which was originally meant to be in the cinemas in November but is now coming out in July 2009. The poor executive has been bombarded with furious and disturbed emails from fans of JK Rowling's wizard entertainments, some of which the Wall Street Journal saw fit to print on its front page.

Jean Fink, a 51-year-old Los Angeles artist who also works as an administrative assistant, claims that she was so distraught after a night of fitful sleep that she dashed off a scathing message to Horn, the man who'd betrayed her. She wrote: "I can't breath amymore [sic] because you just ripped out my heart. What he was doing was screwing up the world. I wasn't... like I was going to go kill the guy, but I was angry. And I'm not done yet."

The letters came within hours of Warners' decision in August to postpone the release of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince because they believed it would make a bigger splash with a summer release. After that, the hate mail began to pour into the studio and an online petition expressing fans' disgust 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.

Matters were made worse after Warner Bros executives' private e-mail addresses were circulated on the Web by Potter fans. "You are blasted, greedy, money-driven executive b-," wrote Lauryn Adams, a student at George Washington University in Washington, DC. The video-sharing website, YouTube, was also used to attack Horn. In one submission, a couple, Greg and Penny Gershman, overlaid their own subtitles to Downfall, the 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, adding: "We are going to make Warner Brothers suffer." ·