Except for One Piece, Netflix’s record for live-action adaptations of popular anime and manga series has not been entirely good. Especially in the case of Death Note. Netflix created a Death Note live-action movie which crashed in terms of numbers and reviews. Fans were not happy to see their favorite series compressed into a movie and had to witness a major change in a lot of aspects of the story.
Ever since the series was released in 2017 fans were not happy with a lot of aspects of the movie be it the storyline change, the cast, or the animation the worst thing that proved to be the biggest mistake of the movie was the the change of location which made the movie way less appealing even before the release.
May fans also believed that changing the location made the adaptation even worse as it remodeled the entire environment of the series and made it look more Western.
The Change of Location Made Death Note Less Appealing
Loosely based on the manga Death Note by Tsugumi Ohba and Takeshi Obata, the movie was a 2017 American supernatural crime thriller film which was directed by Adam Wingard. The story just like the anime series revolved around Light Turner, who was an American high school student.
He discovered the Death Note, a mysterious, supernatural notebook that has the power to kill anyone whose name is written on its pages. Light used the note to kill criminals while going by the nickname Kira, and a secret investigator known as L is on a mission to find the culprit behind the killings.
Death Note’s failure was caused by a multitude of issues. The film’s Western approach to the characters and shifting of the location from Japan to Seattle were two of its biggest weak points that led the series to failure. This was not liked by the fans at all as the change gave the series a more Western approach. On Rotten Tomatoes, the movie has a terrible 23% audience rating and a 36% critic score.
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Death Note Movie was a Terrible Failure
According to critics and the original series fans, a lot of things in the movie were different from the series and these differences eventually led to the downfall of the series. The major one was changing the location of the storyline. The second biggest reason was the decision to cover the entire story of the series into a movie. This stopped to storyline from growing and kept it cooped up in a time limit.
The deviations from the 2003 manga original were a major contributing factor to the downfall. Through the addition of new details, the movie significantly altered the character development of Light, the main character, who was previously portrayed in the original series as witty and conceited, almost godlike.
Source: ScreenRant
