Hollywood is full of surprises, usually it's stupid and daft ones, but this rumour that's been appearing overnight is an interesting one, that they are looking to restart Anne Rice's The Vampire Chronicles series, and with a rather huge star.

Think that sounds familiar? Well you'll remember that the Vampire Lestat was played by Tom Cruise in the 1994 Neil Jordan film Interview with a Vampire and by Stuart Townsend in the 2002 Michael Rymer film Queen of the Damned with the lovely Aaliyah.

Now though there's a new name being associated with the Vampire Chronicles. There are still a number of stories yet to be told for Anne Rice has writing ten novels (Amazon.co.uk / Amazon.com) that follow the creature once known as Lestat de Lioncourt who was turned into a vampire in the eighteenth century.

Interview with the Vampire was based on her first novel, and Queen of the Damned the third, so there are plenty of stories to be told and with the rise in popularity of vampire stories there's a demand for more, but there's a problem with that in my eyes.

Traditional vampires are mean nasty creatures that obey a certain set of rules, the modern vampire stories we're seeing have been paired back and made very teen-friendly, after all, Hollywood has to hit that thirteen year old audience for everything.

Of course these vampire stories were already packing the romanticised version of the vampire into the mainstream, and it worked. You could say that this was the beginning of the move to the Twilight style soft core vampire.

Does that mean we'll see these vampire stories transformed into sexy young men walking around topless and buffed up with sexy women lusting after them and everyone being nice to each other? Please no.

There's a great piece of positivity in the story though, and Bloody Disgusting through Latino Review have the news that Robert Downey Jr. is in talks to play the lead vampire in a new film from the series.

Seems a great choice, the man of the moment and he's got a great personality for the character including that edge that he should have. What do you think? Can they continue the series? Restart it? Will Downey be the man to do it?