The Duffer Brothers have one more season of Stranger Things to deliver, but it looks like they’ve been attached to one other big IP that Netflix wants to get off the ground.
According to Deadline, the Duffer Brothers, with their new production studio Upside Down Pictures, have been tasked to reboot Death Note for live-action.
If you’re unfamiliar with Death Note, the story from author Tsugumi Ohba and illustrator Takeshi Obata follows brilliant teenager Light Yagami who is given a fantastical notebook that allows him to kill anyone whose name he writes on it. Light goes on a vigilante spree, killing people he thinks deserve it, but on his tail is the police who have tasked detective L to find Light and expose his methods of killing people.
Netflix had released a live-action adaptation of Death Note back in 2017, but the movie was met with very poor reviews. As someone whose read the manga, I thought that the series kind of lost the fun ‘cat-and-mouse’ dynamic between L and Light, and seemed to only stick to the edgy parts of the source material.
If the movie did one thing right though, it’s definitely casting Willem Dafoe as the voice of the Death God Ryuk. If they want to salvage one thing from that film, it’s definitely Dafoe’s performance.
No details have been released for how the Duffers will handle the material, but if you look at Stranger Things, you’ll know that they have a good handle at mystery and keeping an audience engaged till the end. With the series format, I’m sure they’ll find time to properly build the dynamic between Light and L.
Or they could focus on some new characters? Until we get some official reveals, all we can do is guess.
No release date has been set for the Death Note reboot, but you can catch Stranger Things now streaming on Netflix.
