Death Note (2017 film)

Netflix took control of the project in 2016 after Warner Brothers stepped away, then commissioned director Adam Wingard to mount a loose retelling of the manga for streaming. The studio set its budget between forty and fifty million dollars and cast Nat Wolff as its lead, with Margaret Qualley and Keith Stanfield alongside him. Rather than Tokyo, the action unfolds in Seattle, and the picture leans into horror, with killings staged far more graphically than the source ever allowed. Several rules governing the book were rewritten for this version: a writer may steer a victim for only two days, and burning the relevant page can call off a death entirely, something impossible in the original.

High schooler Light Turner discovers a notebook in Seattle and meets Ryuk, a death god who explains that writing a name while picturing the person's face ends their life. Goaded into a trial run, Light watches a bully die in a grotesque accident, then targets the hit-and-run driver who killed his mother. A classmate named Mia Sutton learns his secret and pushes him to purge the world of criminals alongside her. The pair invent a godlike alias, Kira, and coerce victims into broadcasting the name, winning public adoration even as the body count climbs.

An eccentric investigator known only as L narrows Kira's source to Seattle's police records and arrives with his guardian Watari to consult Light's father, the police chief James Turner. After a televised taunt fails to provoke a strike, L grows convinced that Light is responsible. Mia secretly murders the FBI agents tailing them, and as L closes in, Light forces Watari to dig up the detective's true name. Mia then turns on Light, seizing Watari's stolen page and entering Light's own name into the book.

The confrontation peaks atop the Seattle Great Wheel. Mia takes the notebook only to learn Light had already doomed her, and Ryuk topples the ride. She plummets to her death while Light drops into the water below, his death page drifting into a burning barrel as L looks on. Light survives in a coma, having engineered the entire sequence to clear himself. When he wakes, his father admits he knows the truth. L, pulled off the case, uncovers Mia's page bearing the agents' names and wavers over whether to write a name of his own.

The casting choices triggered sustained accusations of whitewashing once the leads were announced, a backlash that flared again when the first trailer arrived in March 2017 and that outlets kept citing in later debates about Hollywood adaptations of Japanese material. A separate uproar followed in 2019 when viewers recognized real footage from a fatal 2010 Belgian train collision used within the film; survivors objected, and Netflix eventually swapped the clip and apologized. Critical opinion landed mostly unfavorable, with a 37 percent critics' score on Rotten Tomatoes, a 43 out of 100 on Metacritic, and a 4.5 rating on IMDb, though IGN was warmer at seven out of ten. On Netflix's own platform, more than sixty percent of raters handed it a single star.