What are the Death Note live action movies?

The 2006 films arrived with remarkable speed, the first premiering weeks after the manga ended, directed by Shusuke Kaneko and starring Tatsuya Fujiwara as Light and Kenichi Matsuyama as L, whose performance became definitive for a generation of Japanese fans. Warner Bros. Japan produced them as a two part event, and their commercial success, the second film topped the Japanese box office for weeks, made Death Note the model of the modern manga to film pipeline.

Their boldest move is the ending: the second film closes the L confrontation in a way the manga did not, a divergence sanctioned for the films that makes them a parallel telling rather than an adaptation to the letter. This shelf documents such divergences rather than grading them; the films' ending is the single most discussed difference between the manga and any of its adaptations.

L: Change the WorLd (2008) spun Matsuyama's L into an original final case, adapted also as a novel, and the 2016 projects, a three episode miniseries, New Generation, and the film Light Up the NEW World, jumped a decade past the manga with new notebook bearers and the return of its cast's successors. Japan's live action line is therefore a continuity of its own, with its own canon and collectibles.

The American Netflix film of 2017, directed by Adam Wingard and relocating the story to Seattle, received a divided to hostile reception and stands in this record as the contrast case: compressed, recharacterized and largely rejected by the existing audience, it remains the version most Western non readers know, which is itself a documented fact of the series' global life.

Physical media for the Japanese films, DVD and Blu-ray boxes, steelbooks and limited editions in Japan, plus the film tie-in novels and photo books, form the collecting layer, with Matsuyama's L goods the enduring center. The musical, covered on its own page here, completes the live adaptation map.