The guys over Rope of Silicon noticed that America's MPAA ratings board has certified a new cut of Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone - a longer, extended edition. They contacted Warner Bros. to ask what this meant, and it appears that there will be some new "special" releases of all the films.
The wish to release another version of the Potter films comes as no surprise on one level: it's the world's biggest ever franchise and any new release is good from a financial and fan point of view.
The only problem with this one is we're wondering what could be added, because there aren't as many deleted scenes as we might like for Potter.
How do we know? Well, we asked producer David Heyman recently if he's been tempted to shoot extra deleted and character scenes for the DVD, and he said, "These films take a long time. They take about 30 weeks to shoot, and we couldn’t take any more time, partly because the kids can’t work too long and partly because of the cost."
"It would be a lovely thing for the DVD extras, and inevitably there are things that don’t make it onto the film that we put on the DVD, but to shoot things for the DVD alone, I’m not sure that makes sense here."
We suspect, therefore, that while you might get a few extra snatches of dialogue or scattered moments, you are not going to see excised subplots from the books in these extended versions. Still, we look forward to seeing what they come up with for these extended DVDs.