Leaky’s 2010 Year in Review: Part Two

Please enjoy part two of Leaky’s 2010 Year in Review of Harry Potter news! You can read part one below. Enjoy!
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May

The year continued on with the charity co-founded by J.K. Rowling announced the Light a Birthday Candle for Lumos Campaign which would take place on International Children’s Day, whilst a PSA Daniel Radcliffe created for GLBTQ suicide prevention helpline The Trevor Project was released online. Entertainment Weekly declared Harry Potter the second greatest character of the last twenty years and the Noble Collection announced that it would be selling forty new Harry Potter wands. A slew of Harry Potter actors were nominated for the Philips British Academy Television Awards and voting opened for the “Half-Blood Prince” cast members up for MTV Movie Awards. Emma Watson was busy: the Hermione Granger actress was confirmed to appear in a music video for band One Night Only; was reportedly in talks for a film adaptation of “The Perks of Being a Wallflower”; announced the winners of the Today Show’s class trip contest to the Wizarding World of Harry Potter and attended the 2010 MET Ball in New York City. We got lots of new photos of the trio filming the camping and locket scenes in “Deathly Hallows: Part 1” on location in Britain and both photographs and videos crept online from the filming of the Epilogue scene at Kings Cross in London. Peter Mullan was cast as the Death Eater Yaxley in “Deathly Hallows”, Ninette Finch was reportedly cast as Augusta Longbottom, and “Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince” won a National Movie Award in the Family and Special Recognition categories. Leaky spent the end of May at the Wizarding World of Harry Potter attraction at Universal Studios, Orlando. The attraction had its soft open on the 28th May following a private preview on the 17th of May. Photos and a video of the cast enjoying the attraction were also released.

June
Leaky continued to release footage from our trip to the Wizarding World as reports and videos from the theme park attraction’s Soft Open appeared online. More details about the park’s Forbidden Journey ride also surfaced while Mayor of London Boris Johnson wrote a column in the Daily Telegraph calling for Potter fans to lobby for a London Harry Potter theme park. The Light a Birthday Candle for Lumos campaign took place on the 1st of June and Lumos launched an iPhone app on the same day. EA released a lot of information
about the “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1” video game, as
well as a series of stills and a trailer for the game, followed by more images later in the week. A 19th November release for the video game was confirmed. A new trailer for the LEGO Harry Potter: Years 1-4 video game was released and reviews for the game began to appear online. Meanwhile, “Deathly Hallows” calendar images were released on Amazon and the “Deathly Hallows” trailer aired during the MTV Movie Awards, where Tom Felton was presented with the Best Villain award. Daniel Radcliffe presented the award for Best Featured Actress in a Play at the 2010 Tony Awards alongside actress Katie Holmes. Filming wrapped on “Deathly Hallows”: at the Tony awards, Radcliffe spoke about how it felt to wrap and Warwick Davis tweeted that Rupert Grint arrived for the last day of filming in his famous Ice Cream Truck! Mid-June, the Wizarding World of Harry Potter had its Grand Opening and Celebrity Preview with J.K. Rowling and members of the Harry Potter cast on hand to open the park. The film “Wild Target” was released in the UK on the 18th of June starring Rupert Grint and Bill Nighy (Rufus Scrimgeour). At the end of the month, the Helping Haiti Heal finale livestream took place. Closing out the month of June, a new “Deathly Hallows” trailer was released, along with a collection of new stills.

July

Summer kicked off with new promotional material in the form of “Deathly Hallows” previews from the LEGO Harry Potter video game, a teaser poster for the upcoming film showing Hogwarts on fire, and an update to the official Harry Potter website. Following this, ABC Family also aired some of the first behind the scenes videos for “Deathly Hallows: Part 1” and word came that exclusive footage from the film would debut at ComicCon. This month Leaky announced its Hogwarts Hunt at the Wizarding World of Harry Potter during Infinitus, while the HPA won the Chase Community Giving Challenge. We also found out that Team StarKid’s “A Very Potter Sequel” would be premiering on YouTube July 22nd. Meanwhile, the premiere dates, as well as the first promotional photo, of “How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying” – a Broadway play Dan Radcliffe will star in – were revealed, as were the release dates for the Ultimate Editions of the PoA and GoF films. Leaky was also very proud to announce this month LitDay, a full day of programming related to young adult authors and books during LeakyCon 2011, taking place July 2011 in Orlando, Florida. On July 19th registration for LeakyCon 2011 opened to the public. Further Radcliffe news came when he was confirmed to be starring in “The Woman in Black.” Later in the month, Tom Felton (Draco Malfoy) made an appearance at Comic-Con, where new footage of “Deathly Hallows was shown. We then got our first look at horcruxes and hallows care of photos from ComicCon, along with more from Radcliffe on “The Woman in Black” and Emma Thompson’s star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. The month closed out with news of adismissal request in the copyright case against JKR, a twelve page horoscope drawn by the author up for sale, a rumor of a Harry Potter theme park in India, and a look at limited edition prints by Potter illustrator Mary GrandPre. Last, but not least, Leaky celebrated ten years on the web this month.
August
New images gave way the month of August, including those of the “Deathly Hallows” film, video game box artfor the forthcoming DH:1 game, Emma Watson’s (Hermione) new, short haircut, and video game wallpapers from EA Games. It was then revealed that the final stop in the North American tour for Harry Potter: The Exhibition was to be Seattle’s Pacific Science Centre. As the release of “Deathly Hallows” drew closer, Leaky started its Quotedown to the film, while an issue of Entertainment Weekly revealed not only where “Deathly Hallows: Part 1” would end, but gave us our first clear glimpses at many new characters. It was this month when we first heard of November 11th being the UK premiere date for DH:1, Leaky introduced its Harry Potter Park App (Android version followed), discovered the new EA “Deathly Hallows: Part 1” video game would be Microsoft Kinect-compatible, and high res stills and other updates came to the official UK Harry Potter website. Later in the month, a test screening for the first part of “Deathly Hallows” was held in Chicago and the start of the rapid release of photos began. J. K. Rowling wraps up the month with news of a generous donation to MS research at the University of Edinburgh.
Stay close; part three is on its way!