Death Note: Light Up the NEW World

Director Shinsuke Sato took the helm for this continuation, written by Katsunari Mano and scored by Yutaka Yamada, set ten years past the original duel. Its premise leans on a rewritten limit allowing only six active notebooks at once, which the shinigami exploit by seeding fresh copies among humans. Returning players such as Erika Toda's Misa Amane and Shidou Nakamura's voicing of Ryuk anchor the picture, and brief reprises by Tatsuya Fujiwara and Kenichi Matsuyama tie it back to the original Light and L, yet the narrative belongs to three newcomers aided by two new death gods, Arma and Bepo. A re-edited Special Edition, trimmed by Sato himself, later aired on Japanese television in November 2017.

A decade after the confrontation between L and Light, death gods scatter notebooks across the human world, and they fall into varied hands, including an indiscriminate murderer named Sakura Aoi. Following Soichiro Yagami's example, Tsukuru Mishima heads a newly formed task force and partners with Ryuzaki, an investigator who claims to be L's genuine heir, to recover all six books. The cyber-terrorist Yuki Shien, devoted to Kira, hunts for them as well. Late revelations expose Mishima himself as a secret Kira loyalist operating as Neo Kira, having seized a notebook from Teru Mikami, who had first taken it from Light's son, Hikari Yagami.

Pressing on with what he sees as Light's vision of a peaceful world, Mishima slays criminals and briefly surrenders his ownership to deflect suspicion, but not before inscribing Ryuzaki's name for a delayed death. Shien, aware of Neo Kira, tries to kill Mishima and take his place yet dies as police converge. A regretful Mishima is jailed, but Ryuzaki, just before his own scheduled end, designates him as successor and sets him free. The film closes with Mishima departing to track down the notebooks that remain.

The feature seized the top of the Japanese box office in its opening weekend, unseating Your Name, which had reigned for nine straight weeks. Within a month it had drawn more than two billion yen, roughly 17.85 million dollars, and shifted upward of 1.5 million tickets. Audience scores landed in the middling range, averaging 2.8 of five on Eiga.com, 2.73 on Yahoo, and 6.5 of ten on IMDb. Critics most often faulted the film for lacking the cerebral cat-and-mouse sparring that had defined the earlier entries, while singling out Misa's role and the computer-generated shinigami for praise.