Yates to Direct 'Hallows'?

By Shannon Maughan -- Publishers Weekly, 2/25/2008 8:05:00 AM

The wizard’s out of the bag. Well, maybe. Though it has not yet been confirmed by Warner Bros., David Yates, who is currently directing Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince in London, may have nabbed the same job for the forthcoming Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, the seventh and final Potter film. This nugget of entertainment news was inadvertently leaked by noted children’s author Lois Lowry. Lowry, eagerly awaiting the film adaptation of her own fantasy classic, The Giver, mentioned the bit in passing last week on her blog. “Bad news from The Giver Movie front. David Yates, the director currently working on the next Harry Potter film, was supposed to begin The Giver film next. But he has just decided he wants to do the final Harry Potter first, thereby postponing The Giver by several years.”

Lowry’s comment set Potterphiles and movie fanatics buzzing all over the Internet—a situation she never intended, as noted in her subsequent blog entry, an apology:  Warner Bros. has told MTV News that an announcement about the final Potter flick would be coming “in the next week or so,” and producer David Heyman made a statement last week to the Daily Telegraph that several directors were still under consideration for the job.