Bad news for all of you Harry Potter fanatics. It looks like you’ll have to wait until next Summer to reconnect with the gang at Hogwart’s. The release date for Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, the boy wizard’s sixth venture to the box office, has been pushed back from November 2008 to July 2009.

Warner Bros. President and CEO Alan Horn cites the recent Writers Strike as one of the central reason for pushing the release back.

“Our reasons for shifting ‘Half-Blood Prince’ to summer are twofold,” Horn said in a statement Thursday. “We know the summer season is an ideal window for a family tent-pole release, as proven by the success of our last Harry Potter film [released July 11, 2007], which is the second-highest-grossing film in the franchise, behind only the first installment.”

He added that Warner Bros. is still “feeling the repercussions of the writers’ strike…”

The movie will chronicle Harry’s sixth year at Hogwarts School, where he finds mysterious book belonging to “The Half-Blood Prince” and learns more about Lord Voldemort’s past.