(at around 52 mins) Ryuk's manga design is seen in a book Light is reading at the diner.
Despite the backlash on whitewashing, Tsugumi Ôba and Takeshi Obata, the original creators of Death Note, have praised and defended the film, with Ohba stating, "In a good way, it both followed and diverged from the original work so the film can be enjoyed, of course by not only the fans, but also by a much larger and wider audience".
Right before going into production, Warner Bros dropped the project. Since Adam Wingard was passionate about the project, the studio let him move the film into another platform, with Netflix buying the rights.
During post production, the office was broken into and a flash drive containing some VFX shots was stolen.
Adam Wingard addressed the whitewashing controversy over the film by explaining that the film is an American take on the Death Note story, stating, "It's one of those things where the harder I tried to stay 100% true to the source material, the more it just kind of fell apart. You're in a different country, you're in a different kind of environment, and you're trying to also summarize a sprawling series into a two-hour-long film. For me, it became about; what do these themes mean to modern day America, and how does that affect how we tell the story."