Warner Bros Chooses Shane Black For Japanese Manga 'Death Note' Adaptation

Death Note protagonist Yagami Light

Written by Tsugumi Ohba and illustrated by Takeshi Obata, Death Note was originally published in Japan and later collected in 12 trade paperbacks that have sold more than 38 million copies worldwide. The protagonist, Light, is a bright student who stumbles across a mystical notebook that has the power to kill any person whose name he writes in it. Light decides to launch a secret crusade to rid the streets of criminals. Soon, the student-turned-vigilante finds himself pursued by a famous FBI criminal profiler known only by the alias L. Death Note is wildly popular in Japan and has been turned into live action and animated films, an animated TV series, novels and vidgames. The trio of live action films were distributed by Warner Bros Japan. Warner Bros acquired the manga rights from Shueisha and previously got a script draft from Charley and Vlas Parlapanides.


Death Note was the favorite manga of Black, who made his directing debut on Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, the 2005 cult favorite that helped re-launched Robert Downey Jr.’s star. I’ve been covering Hollywood long enough to recall those heady 1990s days when Black became Hollywood’s spec script king. After landing $250,000 for Lethal Weapon, a script he sold right out of UCLA, Black's subsequent scripts sent studios into a frenzy. Black was paid $1.75 million forThe Last Boy Scout and then set a record with the $4 million New Line paid forThe Long Kiss Goodnight. He and Basic Instinct scribe Joe Eszterhas played a game of can-you-top-this that made for late nights for this journalist, and an excitement that just doesn’t exist in the business that rarely gets competitive enough for studios to bid up anything. One of the reasons Chris Nolan got so much industry respect for Inception was because he gambled on himself and wrote that film on spec.

 By Mike Fleming
via deadline

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