Death Note (2017 film)

• 1. Introduction

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  Death Note reached Netflix in 2017 already carrying its own verdict. Critics summarized it almost like a warning label. It 'benefits from director Adam Wingard's distinctive eye and a talented cast,' they wrote, 'but they aren't enough to overcome a fatally overcrowded canvas.'

  Adam Wingard's film is loosely based on a Japanese manga by Tsugumi Ohba and Takeshi Obata. It follows an American high school student who finds a supernatural notebook, and the international detective who ends up hunting him. How did that story spend the better part of a decade bouncing between studios before landing at Netflix? Why would two of the manga's original creators end up praising a film that most critics tore apart? And what happened months after release, when audiences noticed something troubling embedded in one of its accident scenes?

• 2. The Long Road To Netflix

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  In 2007, the Malaysian newspaper The Star reported that more than ten American film companies wanted the rights to Death Note. Vertigo Entertainment took on the project first, hiring Charley and Vlas Parlapanides to write the script. Roy Lee, Doug Davison, Dan Lin, and Brian Witten signed on as producers. On the 30th of April 2009, Variety reported that Warner Bros. Pictures, which had distributed the original Japanese films, had bought the American remake rights. That same year, Zac Efron addressed rumors that he might play the lead, saying the project was 'not on the front burner.'

  On the 13th of January 2011, Shane Black was hired to direct, working from a script by Anthony Bagarozzi and Charles Mondry. Warner's studio wanted to change Light Yagami's motive from justice to vengeance and cut the Shinigami entirely. Black opposed the changes, and the project was never greenlit under his direction. He confirmed in a 2013 interview with Bleeding Cool that he was still attached. By July 2014, rumors suggested Gus Van Sant would take over as director, with Lin, Lee, Davison, and Witten still producing.

  On the 27th of April 2015, The Hollywood Reporter revealed that Adam Wingard would direct the film instead. Dan Lin, Roy Lee, Jason Hoffs, and Masi Oka were named as producers, with Niija Kuykendall and Nik Mavinkurve overseeing for the studio. Producers said the film would carry an R rating. In April 2016, TheWrap reported that Warner Bros. had decided to make fewer films, putting the project into turnaround. That freed Wingard to shop it elsewhere. Within 48 hours, he was reportedly approached by nearly every major film studio.

  On the 6th of April 2016, it was confirmed that Netflix had bought the film from Warner Bros. The budget ranged from $40 million to $50 million. Jeremy Slater had written the most recent draft of the script. Production began in British Columbia on the 30th of June 2016, with Vancouver standing in for Seattle under DN (Canada) Productions, Inc. Atticus Ross and Leopold Ross composed the score, but the cast that would carry the story was only starting to take shape.

• 3. Casting An American Kira

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  Nat Wolff was cast in the lead role on the 29th of September 2015. Margaret Qualley joined as the female lead on the 12th of November 2015. LaKeith Stanfield joined the cast in June 2016, followed on the 30th of June 2016 by Paul Nakauchi and Shea Whigham. On the 2nd of August 2016, Willem Dafoe was announced to voice the death god Ryuk, a role played physically in costume by Jason Liles. Brian Drummond, who voiced Ryuk in the English dub of the anime, publicly approved of Dafoe's casting. Masi Oka, one of the film's producers, announced that he would also appear onscreen.

  Early casting announcements drew accusations of whitewashing, following comparisons to other Hollywood adaptations of Japanese manga such as Dragonball Evolution and Ghost in the Shell. Producers Roy Lee and Dan Lin responded in a statement. Their vision, they said, 'has always been to...introduce the world to this dark and mysterious masterpiece.' They added that the cast, writing, and producing teams reflected a belief in 'the story's concept of moral relevance.' They called it a universal theme without racial boundaries.

  Wingard would soon have to explain, character by character, what he had kept from the manga and what he had changed.

• 4. Reinventing The Characters

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  Nat Wolff's Light Turner lacks the ruthless, sadistic, and sociopathic edges of his manga counterpart for most of the film. The film depicts him in a more sympathetic, humanized light than the original Light Yagami. Only near the end does he reveal a darker, more intellectual side that echoes the character from the anime and manga.

  LaKeith Stanfield plays L as a nameless, highly intelligent, and esteemed detective who is also socially eccentric and quirky, with a past shrouded in mystery. Margaret Qualley's Mia Sutton is not a direct adaptation of the manga's Misa Amane. In an interview with io9, Wingard said Sutton instead draws on the sociopathic qualities of Light Yagami himself.

  Shea Whigham's James Turner is Light's widowed father and a veteran Seattle police detective who has no idea his son is Kira. Unlike the manga version of the character, James lost his wife in a hit-and-run crime whose driver was acquitted. That loss left him with a more strained relationship with his son. Paul Nakauchi plays Watari as L's assistant and foster father.

  Producer Masi Oka has a cameo as Detective Sasaki, a Tokyo police detective investigating one of Light's murders. Christopher Britton voiced Soichiro Yagami, James's manga counterpart, in the English dub of the anime. Here, he cameos as Aaron Peltz, a serial child molester and one of Light's victims. Wingard said the harder he tried to stay '100 percent true to the source material,' the more the adaptation 'kind of fell apart.' Squeezing a 'sprawling series' into a two-hour film meant asking what its themes meant to modern day America. He still preserved certain elements. Light's father remained a police officer. L kept his mannerisms and orphanage background. Light stayed an intellectually gifted, introverted student, and Ryuk kept his affinity for apples.

  Those preserved details were meant to survive whatever Light and L's cat-and-mouse chase became on screen.

• 5. Cat And Mouse In Seattle

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  In Seattle, Washington, high school senior Light Turner discovers the Death Note, an ancient notebook that can kill anyone whose name is written in it. Ryuk, a Japanese death god who oversees the killings, convinces him to try it. Light first writes down the name of his bully, Kenny Doyle, who dies in a freak accident. That same night, he uses the notebook again, targeting Anthony Skomal, his mother's murderer. The next morning, his father James tells him about Skomal's gruesome death.

  At school, Light shows the notebook's power to classmate Mia Sutton by engineering the death of an armed felon during a televised hostage standoff. The two begin dating and start ridding the world of criminals and terrorists together. Light adopts the pseudonym Kira, a name meant to point investigators away from his own continent.

  Detective L begins investigating from Tokyo and deduces that Kira is operating from Seattle. He also concludes that Kira cannot kill without knowing a victim's name and face. Working with James and the Seattle Police Department, L has the FBI track Light and other suspects. Light refuses Mia's request to kill the agents assigned to the case, then learns of their bizarre mass suicide, which he blames on Ryuk.

  James threatens Kira on live television and returns home unharmed, convincing L that Light is Kira. After glimpsing L's unmasked face, Light forces Watari, L's assistant, to travel to a secret orphanage in Montauk, New York. That is where L's real name is hidden. His plan is to control Watari for 48 hours, burn the page bearing his name, and kill L without harming Watari. Meanwhile, L brings police to search Light's house, but Mia smuggles the notebook out first.

  Light and Mia use their school's dance to slip away from L and the police. Watari reaches Light, but security guards kill him before he can reveal L's real name, since Light never found and burned his page. Light later learns that Mia caused the agents' deaths and deliberately withheld Watari's page, since only one victim could be saved.

  Mia reveals she has written Light's name in the notebook and plans to kill him at midnight, accusing him of lacking conviction to Kira's cause. She offers to burn his page if he hands her the notebook, and Light agrees, telling her to meet him at the Seattle Great Wheel. Furious over Watari's death, L launches a personal manhunt for Light, whom James has ordered police to protect.

  After a long chase, L corners Light at gunpoint before a Kira supporter knocks him unconscious nearby. Light meets Mia atop the Great Wheel and asks her to abandon the notebook and start a new life with him. She grabs it from him instead. She then realizes her own death is now tied to that act, since Light had already written her name in it. Ryuk destroys the Great Wheel, killing Mia and dropping Light into the water below. L arrives just as Light's torn-out page lands in a burning barrel.

  Before confronting Mia, Light had arranged for a criminally charged doctor to save him and place him in a medically induced coma. Another criminal had been made to retrieve the notebook, continue Kira's killings, and return it, and Light later killed both of them through forced suicide. Ordered off the case for misconduct, L defiantly searches Mia's house and finds the page listing the agents' names. He then considers writing down a name, implied to be Light's, to avenge Watari. At the hospital, James questions his son, who insists the killings were the 'lesser of two evils.' Ryuk peers around the corner, murmuring that 'humans are so interesting' while laughing at Light.

• 6. A Mixed Verdict

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  On Rotten Tomatoes, Death Note holds an approval rating of 36 percent based on 77 reviews, with an average score of 4.8 out of 10. Metacritic gave the film a score of 43 out of 100 based on 14 critics, calling the reception 'mixed or average.'

  Jeanette Catsoulis of The New York Times wrote that the film 'feels rushed and constricted' compared to the scale of its source material. She praised Wingard's direction for favoring 'mood over mayhem.' Peter Debruge of Variety compared the adaptation to a Donnie Darko-styled work aimed at Western audiences rather than the original's audience. He also wrote that 'the movie never quite reckons with just how twisted a concept it's peddling, and that's easily the scariest thing about it.'

  Brian Tallerico of Rogerebert.com gave the film one out of four stars. He argued the changes Wingard made served no artistic or thematic purpose and missed the manga's central cat-and-mouse dynamic between Light and L. Producers, he wrote, 'refused to make Light the antihero he needed to be.' Adding Mia as a love interest, he said, left the project 'hollow at its center.' He mainly praised the performances of Stanfield and Dafoe.

  Tsugumi Ohba and Takeshi Obata, the manga's original creators, praised the film despite the criticism. Ohba said the film 'both followed and diverged from the original work,' calling that a good thing. He added that it could 'be enjoyed... by not only the fans, but also by a much larger and wider audience.' Wingard deleted his Twitter account after facing backlash over the negative reviews.

• 7. Borrowed Footage, Real Grief

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  A few months after release, viewers discovered that footage of a train accident in the film was not fabricated. It was real footage of a 2010 train collision in Buizingen, Belgium, in which 19 people died. Both the rail operator and survivors of the crash criticized the film's use of the imagery as disrespectful to the victims.

  That criticism arrived just as talk of a sequel was starting to build.

• 8. Two Films Or None

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  In an interview with Heat Vision, Wingard said Netflix wanted at least two films from the start. 'There are definitely lots of places to go, and we know generally where we would take it,' he said. 'Hopefully, people will watch it and Netflix will order a sequel. They definitely are ready to. They just need people to watch it.'

  On the 17th of October 2017, Sarandos spoke with Quartz about the film's viewership. He said three films released that quarter, including Death Note, Naked, and To the Bone. Together, he said, they would count as 'sizable successes' if their viewing numbers were measured in movie tickets sold.

  On the 22nd of August 2018, The Hollywood Reporter reported that a sequel was in development, with Greg Russo writing the screenplay. On the 20th of April 2021, Russo said the sequel would stay more faithful to the manga than the first film. On the 21st of September 2021, Oka said the sequel would take fan criticism of the first film into account.