The roadmap for the filmed fate of Harry Potter and his Hogwarts cohorts is finally laid out. The sixth film, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, will make its debut this winter, November 21, 2008. With all the principals signed to finish out the series, the winter release is expected to be a big hit as Harry Potter films released in the winter holiday season always tend to do better than those released in the summer season.

The plans for the final book are a bit more complex in its translation to the silver screen. First, the book will be divided into two films, rather than compressed into one. That’s because producers felt too much of the final book was vital, so rather than cutting content, they chose to make Harry Potter and the Deathly Hollows into a four-hour, two-part event.

Deathly Hollows Part 1 will release two years after Half-Blood Prince, on November 19, 2010. Part 2, however, will be released far more quickly, as the two films will be shot at the same time. Part 2 will release only about six or seven months later, sometime in the Summer 2011 season.

The extra passage of time between Half-Blood Prince and Deathly Hallows parts 1 and 2 is disappointed, as it will allow actors Daniel Radcliffe, Rupert Grint and Emily Watson to continue to out-age their roles; with all the books now out, it would have been nice to see the production schedule moved up so that Deathly Hallows fell on November 2009, rather than November 2010.

Time will tell if this is a good judgment call on the studio’s part or if someone should have invested in a speaker mount into the Warner Brothers executive office buildings to shout some sense into them.