Stranger Things creators developing live-action Death Note series

The fourth season of Stranger Things just wrapped up, and it’s been a monster success for Netflix, becoming the second show in the streamer’s history to top one billion hours viewed in the first 28 days of release. Naturally, Netflix wants more from creators Ross and Matt Duffer, and they’re about to get it.

Deadline reports that the Duffer Brothers have set up Upside Down Pictures, named after the evil alternate dimension in their landmark series. Headed up by Hilary Leavitt, the production company already has several projects in development, most of them headed to Netflix. They include:

• A Stranger Things spinoff, obviously. We don’t know much about it yet, but the Duffers are promising something “1000% different” from what we saw on the original show.
• An original series from Jeffrey Addiss and Will Matthews, the guys behind Netflix’s cancelled series The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance. That show had ’80s roots, so naturally the Duffers are all over it.
• Speaking of the ’80s, the Duffers will develop a series based on the 1984 Stephen King book The Talisman, about a 12-year-old who stumbles into a parallel universe. That definitely tracks.
• A stage play set within the world of Stranger Things. That one’s interesting. It reminds me of the Game of Thrones stage play also in production. After Harry Potter and the Cursed Child was a hit, everyone’s on this.

Netflix will try to make a live-action Death Note again

Pretty much everything on that list has roots in the pop culture of the 1980s, which is be expected from the guys who made Stranger Things. Speaking in a statement about their intentions for Upside Down Pictures, the Duffers said that they want to tell the kinds of stories that inspired them growing up, “stories that take place at that beautiful crossroads where the ordinary meets the extraordinary, where big spectacle co-exists with intimate character work, where heart wins out over cynicism.”

The one exception is a live-action series based on Death Note, the 2007 anime series about an intense teenager who finds a book. But wait, it’s a special book! If he writes a name in the book, that person dies. He uses this to try and remake the world and causes all kinds of raucousness in the process.

It’s quite a bit more cynical than the Duffers sound willing to go. Also, Netflix already made a live-action movie based on Death Note in 2017. It starred Willem Dafoe as the death god Ryuk and pretty much nobody liked it.

Note that even though all of these projects are being developed at the Duffer Brothers’ new studio, they won’t be personally overseeing all the shows. Their first order of business is to finish Stranger Things, which has one more season to go.

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