Understandably, the first trailer for Netflix's
Death Note is going for tone rather than exposition but casting ethnicity aside, the series appears to be a fairly close adaptation of the source material. And going by said tone, the series' first trailer definitely has us intrigued.
In addition, the first trailer also provides an August 25 release date, giving us just a little under 5 months before the anime adaptation premieres at midnight. Has the first footage changed your mind, either way, about watching the Adam Wingard-directed movie?
ABOUT NETFLIX'S DEATH NOTE SERIES
Directed by Adam Wingard (You're Next), the writing duo of Charles & Vlas Parlapanides (Immortals) and Jeremy Slater (The Lazarus Effect, unused Fantastic Four script) penned the most recent draft of the script. The full cast includes, Nat Wolff as Light Turner, Keith Stanfield as L, Shea Whigham (Boardwalk Empire) as James Turner, Paul Nakauchi (Star Wars: The Clone Wars) as Watar, Willem Dafoe as Ryuki and Margaret Qualley (The Leftovers) as Mia Sutton.
ORIGINAL MANGA SYNOPSIS: A shinigami, as a god of death, can kill any person—provided they see their victim's face and write their victim's name in a notebook called a Death Note. One day, Ryuk, bored by the shinigami lifestyle and interested in seeing how a human would use a Death Note, drops one into the human realm.
High school student and prodigy Light Yagami stumbles upon the Death Note and—since he deplores the state of the world—tests the deadly notebook by writing a criminal's name in it. When the criminal dies immediately following his experiment with the Death Note, Light is greatly surprised and quickly recognizes how devastating the power that has fallen into his hands could be.
With this divine capability, Light decides to extinguish all criminals in order to build a new world where crime does not exist and people worship him as a god. Police, however, quickly discover that a serial killer is targeting criminals and, consequently, try to apprehend the culprit. To do this, the Japanese investigators count on the assistance of the best detective in the world: a young and eccentric man known only by the name of L.
Death Note is a 2003 Japanese manga from writer Tsugumi Ohba and artist Takeshi Obata. The series concluded in 2006 at 12 volumes. An anime adaptation began airing in 2006 and concluded in 2007 at 37 episodes. A live-action Japanese film trilogy was first released in theaters in 2006, with the third and final film releasing in 2008. A new Japanese film, Death Note: Light Up the New World, will tell an original story set 10 years after the conclusion of the first trilogy. Hollywood has been attempting to make their own live-action Death Note film since 2007. Warner Bros. acquired film rights in 2009 and hired Shane Black to direct in 2011. However, the project languished in development hell at WB, who let their rights lapse. Netflix secured filming rights in April 2016 and quickly set the project into production.