Death Note

On the data. There are five unconnected screen continuities here and nothing crosses between them. The manga by Tsugumi Ohba and Takeshi Obata ran in Weekly Shonen Jump from December 2003 to May 2006, 108 chapters across 12 volumes, with two later one-shots collected as Short Stories. The 2006 anime from Madhouse is 37 episodes, confirmed by three independent sources with no disagreement, and covers the complete manga. Japanese listings sometimes split its broadcast into two parts; that is a scheduling block, not two seasons. The two Relight specials are the one place counts genuinely disagree. English and Japanese reference sources and Anime News Network list them as two separate television specials broadcast a year apart, on 31 August 2007 and 22 August 2008, which is why they are listed as two specials here. Some databases collapse them into a single two-episode entry called Death Note: Rewrite, and at least one streaming service appends the first as episode 38 of the series, which is where the occasional claim of 39 episodes comes from. The series itself is 37. Both specials are re-cuts of footage already broadcast, the first reframed from Ryuk's point of view with new dialogue and some new animation, the second compressing the second arc so hard that Mello nearly disappears. The Japanese live action films are all one continuity, and this is the part most guides get wrong. L: Change the World is a spin-off in subject but not in continuity: it is set during and immediately after the end of The Last Name, dramatising L's final 23 days on an unrelated bioterrorism case, and it ends with him naming an orphan boy Near and delivering him to Wammy's House. New Generation, three episodes released on Hulu Japan in September 2016, was commissioned specifically to fill the ten year gap before Light Up the New World, one episode for each new lead. Light Up the New World is a direct sequel to The Last Name set ten years later, with Erika Toda returning as Misa and Sota Aoyama as Matsuda, the only character who still remembers the Kira case. One thing genuinely could not be confirmed: no source states whether Light Up the New World treats the events of L: Change the World as having happened. The two are compatible and never explicitly linked on screen, so treat that as unresolved rather than settled either way. The 2015 television drama is a standalone reboot despite also being a Nippon Television production. Light is a university student, his mother is dead before the story starts, Misa's notebook is red, and L drinks energy drinks rather than eating sweets. It is the first live action version to adapt the second arc's characters. The 2017 Netflix film relocates everything to Seattle, renames the leads, and changes core rules of the notebook, including replacing the 23 day control window with two days. It holds 36 percent from 77 critics and 23 percent from audiences. On what is coming: Netflix announced a live action series from the Duffer Brothers' Upside Down Pictures in July 2022, with Halia Abdel-Meguid attached to write in October 2022. There has never been a cast, an episode count, a production start or a release date. The Duffer Brothers signed with Paramount and their Netflix deal ran to April 2026, and there has been no update since, so whether the project continues, moves or is quietly dead is unresolved. It is not listed here rather than listed with a guessed year. A separate sequel to the 2017 film had Greg Russo attached to write from 2018 and has been treated as superseded since 2023. Finally, headlines about Death Note returning in 2026 refer to the stage musical, which has a London run at the Barbican from 30 July to 12 September 2026. That is theatre, not a new screen adaptation, and there is no announced new anime.

On your progress. Checkmarks are saved on this device and are tied to permanent title IDs, not to list positions, so new episodes, titles, and whole franchises can be added later without disturbing anything you've already marked. Use Sync & backup to move progress to another device.