10 Vampire Vacations
www.forbestraveler.com: Even before Bela Lugosi muttered those infamous words “I never drink… wine” in his 1920s stage and film versions of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, vampires have been ingrained in our culture. Never more than now. Writers Anne Rice and Stephen King helped keep vampires alive and recent television shows, movies, and books like True Blood and Twilight have introduced vampires to a whole new generation.
For true vampire devotees, a must-see is the area of Romania known as Transylvania, home to Vlad the Impaler, the historical inspiration for Dracula.
For some, New Orleans has become synonymous with vampires thanks to Anne Rice and her Vampire Chronicles. For this reason, Sidney Smith created Haunted History Tours, which take guests on “bone-chilling” tours of real and fictional vampire sites throughout The Big Easy.
Then there’s the new go-to destination for tween vampire fanatics, Forks, Washington, the real town featured in the fictional Twilight series. Tours include stops at Charlie and Bella Swan’s house—though it only exists in the novel, the McIrvin family has volunteered their own home as the official house.
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That’s a nice list, really. Not only Forks and New Orleans – also San Francisco and Transilvania. I’d love to go on a Vampire Vacation – what about you?
‘Circle of Eight’ hitting Web, Blockbuster
www.hollywoodreporter.com: Paramount Digital Entertainment’s original Web series “Circle of Eight” premieres Tuesday and has picked up some additional distribution from Blockbuster.
” ‘Circle of Eight’ shows our ongoing commitment to launch studio-quality entertainment on digital platforms,” said Thomas Lesinski. “With strong, mutually beneficial relationships with brands such as MySpace, Mountain Dew, Adobe and Blockbuster, we can launch premium-quality content in the digital window and continue to monetize ‘Circle of Eight’ on additional platforms, multiple windows and in international territories.”
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More premium-quality sounds good to me. Do you also think additional platforms are good?
Studios’ Quest for Life After DVDs
www.nytimes.com: Movie studios, desperate to return their home entertainment divisions to growth, are scrambling to shape the post-DVD era.
Until very recently, most Hollywood heavyweights were loath to speak too openly about the promise of digital entertainment — the downloading and streaming of movies and television shows on computers, Internet-enabled televisions and mobile devices. Nobody wanted to do anything that might slow the DVD gravy train.
But business currents have shifted. While DVD and Blu-ray will remain a huge profit center for years to come, studio executives are finally confronting an uncomfortable reality: little silver discs — for reasons of convenience, price and consumer burnout — may never recover their sales power. To grow, studios need to figure out digital distribution.
Everyone is trying to solve one problem: consumers, the industry believes, will be reluctant to open their wallets for digital movies and TV shows until they get more portability and can watch the same content on several devices. Studios want to make consumers collect digital entertainment the way they would DVDs or books.
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What do you think – will DVD become the same like CD in the past? We buy more and more online and download instead of take a real disc?
