An English-language, live-action adaptation of Tsugumi Ohba and Takeshi Obata’s acclaimed manga series Death Note has been in the works for almost a decade now, but production on the film officially got underway within the last month. That hasn’t stopped the project from bringing on another high-profile cast member, with The Boondock Saints and Spider-Man actor Willem Dafoe recently joining the cast in a very important role.
According to Mashable, Dafoe will reportedly provide the voice of Ryuk, one of the prominent “death gods” from the story that are popularly known as “shinigami” in Japanese culture. The death gods hold the power of life and death over humans, and the Death Note series chronicles the events that transpire when a brilliant teenager comes into possession of the book that gives Ryuk his power.
Set to be directed by Adam Wingard (You’re Next, The Guest), Death Note features Paper Towns and The Fault in our Stars actor Nat Wolff as Light Turner, a high school student who comes across a mysterious notebook that gives him the power to kill anyone whose name he writes in it. When he decides to embark on a mission to rid the world of anyone he deems unworthy of life, he attracts the attention of the authorities and an eccentric investigative genius who challenges him in a tense, cat-and-mouse battle of wits to determine the fate of the world.
In the original manga series, Ryuk was depicted as a monstrous creature who hovers around Light and is only visible to the owner of the notebook, observing what he does with it.
Along with Wolff and Dafoe, the film’s cast also includes Margaret Qualley (The Nice Guys) as Mia Sutton; Keith Stanfield (Straight Outta Compton) as the enigmatic “L,” Paul Nakauchi (Alpha and Omega) as Watari, and Shea Whigham (Agent Carter) as James Turner.
Told over 108 chapters and later collected into 12 volumes, the Death Note manga series sold over 30 million copies as of 2015, and was adapted into a popular, 37-episode anime series. It was also adapted into a trilogy of Japanese-language, live-action movies that each topped the Japanese box office for several weeks and received brief theatrical releases in North America. The series has also been adapted into video games, novels, and a 2015 stage musical.
Wingard’s live-action Death Note movie is expected to premiere in 2017 on Netflix.
China just gave Hollywood a cautionary tale about AI filmmaking. Sanxingdui: Future Past, billed as the country's first fully AI-generated movie, hit theaters on October 23 and bombed at the box office.
According to Futurism, the film's reported $1.5 million production budget landed on more than 10,000 screens. Yet it pulled in only about $181,000, averaging roughly $20 per screen, making the budget difficult to recover.
Some of the best shots in Grok Imagine’s AI-made Odyssey don’t contain actors. Ancient landscapes stretch into the distance. Close-ups of grimy hands suggest people who have touched something rougher than a keyboard. For a few seconds, the illusion holds.
https://twitter.com/imagine/status/2113712964419063911
YouTube videos could soon look better without eating quite so much data, right? Thankfully, the platform plans to introduce a new video format called AV2 on its web player in early 2027, promising more efficient streaming and potentially fewer playback hiccups on slower internet connections. The big headline is a roughly 30% improvement in compression efficiency over AV1, YouTube's existing video format. That doesn't guarantee every video will use 30% less data, but it could make streaming a little easier on both internet connections and data allowances.
What is AV2, and why should viewers care?