Harry Potter DVDs and Blu-rays to vanish at the end of the year

I thought I would write a short little post today since it appears Warner Home Video is going to pull the entire Harry Potter series on both DVD and Blu-ray from store shelves at the end of this year.

What does this mean? It means that if you want the unedited theatrical versions of these movies without any Star Wars-type changes you had better consider buying them very soon as the future re-releases of these movies may likely have additional scenes that were cut in the original version shown in theaters and/or have alterations such as different music in some scenes.

I don't think this is a smart move for Warner Video as original DVDs may be "phased out" by the movie studios before we see the re-release of these movies to home video if they wait like 5 years to bring them back to stores in disc form. That would mean that in order to buy and watch Harry Potter movies in the future, you would be required to have a Blu-ray player. People without Blu-ray players would likely be upset with Warner not being able to play them on their regular DVD player. But of course by then Blu-ray players will likely have come down a lot more in price than they have so far.

So the bottom line is that we might have a long wait to see what the re-release of the Harry Potter series of movies will be like. They might be the same exact discs and packaging, or they could be significantly different.