'Death Note' was a killer to make: The manga-based film from Netflix had to negotiate some thorny cultural land mines
"Death Note" director Adam Wingard doesn't seem to mind the death threats he says he's received from overzealous fans of Tsugumi Ohba and Takeshi Obata's original manga, about a supernatural book with the power to kill and the morally dubious teenager in whose possession it lands.
What really bothers the indie-horror veteran ("You're Next," "The Guest"), who opened his "Death Note" remake to mixed reviews from critics and fans over the weekend, are the angry manga mobs comparing the new Netflix thriller to a certain Hollywood studio remake that was woefully lost in translation.
"It's kind of annoying when they say, 'This is the next "Dragonball: Evolution,"'" he said on a recent afternoon in Hollywood, wincing at the notion of equating his "Death Note" to the cartoonish 2009 critical and commercial failure. "It's just such a completely different thing."
Still, he felt the pain of the fans who counted down to Friday's streaming debut ready to scrawl his name into their own Death Notes.
"The anime community has just been beaten down so badly
