That's what I'm asking myself, with news that Avatar has been moved May 22nd, 2009, all the way back to December 18th, 2009. It's not a production delay, we know that for sure. We also know that the writers strike isn't going to hurt any 2008 productions because they were ready to into production before the strike hit.

That means the feature films that will be crunched would have been the films still being tweaked and put together right now for release sometime in...2009. If the studios are predicting a growing shortfall in '09 because of a strike that seems like it's going to last into the second quarter of next year, it only makes sense to start spreading out your largest projects with the most potential across the calendar to blunt the lack of content.

"This is a win-win for us," said Hutch Parker, vice chairman of Fox Film Group. "'Avatar' goes to the 'Titanic' date in December, which was obviously auspicious for Jim and us, and by the time of the release, there will be more worldwide 3-D screens available."

You know what I'm not seeing in this story? A reason for pushing the release back nearly seven full months. It's "win/win" for Fox but they won't tell anybody why they did it, and apparently, whoever wrote this stuff had no intention of actually doing his/her job and asking.

My money is the strike, anybody have thoughts?

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