Hope you haven’t tired of live-action anime adaptations because the creators of Stranger Things, the Duffer Brothers, are making a new live-action Death Note.
According to Deadline, Matt and Ross Duffer’s newly-formed production studio, Upside Down Pictures, will work on a new live-action series adaptation for the classic supernatural anime for Netflix. Although Netflix already made a live action adaptation of Death Note in 2017, the Upside Down Pictures version will be an entirely new take.
Death Note, written by Tsugumi Ohba and illustrated by Takeshi Obata, follows Light Yagami, a sardonic high school student who finds a supernatural notebook that gives him the power to kill anyone whose name is written in it, so long as he has their names and faces in mind.
Outside of the Death Note remake, the Duffer Brothers are working on a number of projects, including a series adaptation of Stephen King’s 1984 novel The Talisman, a stage play “set within the world and mythology of Stranger Things,” a separate spin-off series of Stranger Things vaguely described as “based on an origin,” and an untitled original series alongside Jeffrey Addiss and Will Matthews, the creators of Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance.
Meanwhile, Netflix has already turned off many Death Note fans with its previous undertaking. Death Note’s 2017 Netflix live-action movie was…a movie. Instead of taking place in Japan, it was set in America and followed the anglo-saxonized Light Turner, L, and Mia Suttoni (originally Misa Amane) as they respectively gaslight, gatekeep, and girlboss each other on screen for an hour and 40 minutes while trying to claim control of the Death Note.
While the 2017 live-action movie wasn’t as terrible as the live-action treatment that Avatar: The Last Airbender or Dragon Ball Z: Evolution got, its whinier bumbling protagonists were grating for series fans. That isn’t to say Death Note’s live-action movies in Japan were so great either. Arguably, the best part of every live-action attempt at this classic anime has been its iterations of the titular shinigami, Ryuk–particularly Willem Dafoe’s version. Can’t get enough of that apple-loving bastard.
If Upside Down Pictures’ adaptation also takes place in the good ‘ol U.S. of A, let’s just hope it shelves Light or L this time around and instead adapts the 2020 one-shot that had then-president Donald Trump enter a bidding war for the supernatural notebook. That would be class.
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