It's imported from Japan, where it's already been the basis of four homegrown live-action movies with Japanese casts. Then again, Tsugumi Ohba and Takeshi Obata's saga isn't Asian-American either. In transferring the action from Tokyo to Seattle, director Adam Wingard and producers Jason Hoffs, Roy Lee, Dan Lin, and Masi Oka cast Nat Wolff in the lead role rather than an Asian-American actor. This Light is friendless, aloof, and also white - a furor kicked up online around the film in the wake of the whitewashing perpetrated by the earlier 2017 anime adaptation of Ghost in the Shell. He's introduced huddled on a table outside his high school doing other students' homework for pay. Americanized Light is still a bored, bright teen who gets gifted with a nearly boundless power to kill at the start of the story, but he's not popular the way he predecessor is. Light Yagami, the handsome, misanthropic genius at the center of the original Death Note manga series, has been transformed into Light Turner in Netflix's movie adaptation.
