Bollywood's Hari Puttar Premiere Postponed Over Harry Potter Lawsuit

The Bollywood children's film Hari Puttar has been forced to postpone its premiere after the Hollywood studio behind the Harry Potter blockbusters took the Indian producers to court over the title.

Warner Brothers claims the Bollywood film sounds too similar to the teenage wizard's name and has refused the Indian studio's offer of putting a disclaimer in the title sequence. The Harry Potter films have grossed $4.5bn (?2.5bn) since 2001.

Hari Puttar was due to open at the end of last week but will now only be shown later this month. Indian television networks refused to run promos for the film. A Delhi court is due to hear the case this month.

"The movie will come out on [September] 26," said a spokesman for the Mumbai studio Mirchi Movies. "We do not know about the exact legal position as of now."

Hari Puttar: A Comedy of Terrors was shot in Yorkshire. It is about a 10-year-old Indian boy whose family moves to England and becomes embroiled in a plan to save the world from two criminals. Hari is a popular Indian name and puttar means son in Punjabi.

The next movie instalment of JK Rowling's Harry Potter franchise, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, is expected to be released next summer. Warner Bros claims Hari Puttar is an infringement of its intellectual property rights.

This month, JK Rowling won her claim that a fan violated her copyright with plans to publish a Harry Potter encyclopedia. A Manhattan judge ruled that the unauthorized guide would cause her irreparable harm as a writer.

Mirchi Movies said Hari Puttar "bears no resemblance to the Hollywood film Harry Potter and it is a completely different story".

Some Indian critics have alleged that the story is strikingly similar to 20th Century Fox's 1990 film Home Alone, about a child and two inept thieves. The London-based director, Lucky Singh, dismissed this. "The film that you mentioned neither has songs nor animation [unlike Hari Puttar]," he said.

Bollywood has often mimicked foreign movies: last month's hit Ugly Aur Pagli was a frame-by-frame rendition of a 2001 Korean film My Sassy Girl, and Hollywood's The Blair Witch Project was remade in India as Kaal. Singh told the Times of India that "Hari Puttar is suffering because of what others copied".