Harry Potter DVDs will ‘disappear’ by 2012

That’s magic! Warner Bros. will make 'Harry Potter' DVDs and Blu-rays disappear before the end of the year.

According to Deadline, the studio behind the most successful franchise ever will cease shipping all discs featuring the boy wizard on 29 December. The series has so far grossed £7.5 billion for Warners, with £3.2 billion coming from home entertainment sales.

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Whereas you will still be able to watch ‘Harry Potter’ via Video on Demand services, including digital platform sales, owning a physical copy will take some nifty wizardry of your own.

The final film in the saga, 'Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2' will be released in the UK on 2 December, with the 8-disc box set also announced for the same date. That gives you less than a month to get the discs, with demand already expected to be high due to the festive period, and the series now being complete.

If it sounds like a bizarre strategy, it’s actually worked very successfully for rival studio Disney in the past. They re-released theatrical version of both ‘Sleeping Beauty’ and ‘Beauty and the Beast’, before flogging special edition DVDs afterwards for a limited period.

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The logic is that it creates a demand that might not otherwise exist, though we can’t imagine this would be a problem for ‘Potter’.

Instead Warner Bros.' thinking might be thus: the release window will force parents to buy the discs for their kids before Christmas, rather than wait for the January sales.

However, fans in the UK shouldn't despair too much. On 31 March, 2012 the doors open to Warner Bros. Studio Tour London – The making of Harry Potter, a behind-the-scenes ‘experience’ which lets you walk through some of the most iconic sets from the series.