I'll make dinner with my right hand and write theories with my left. I'll take a potato chip and EAT IT.

I'll take my leftovers and REHEAT IT. I'll play Mario and BEAT IT.

I'll open the script for Doctor Who part three... *laughing*

-and COMPLETE IT. Well, maybe not that last one...

*Film Theory Intro* I love how you made this Mat.

Hello internet! Welcome to Film Theory.

So, here's a fun fact. When I'm at conventions, one of the most popular things

I'm asked to sign are people's recently purchased Death Notes.

It makes me wonder whether they're fans of the show or just haters who want to end the channel...

*ominous music* By any means necessary...

Either way, I'm totally in the clear since I don't take chances and sign with a misspelling of my name.

It's totally true! The paranoia is real!!

Seriously, if you have ever asked me to sign your Death Note, check it out.

Usually, what I do is I attach a little bit of extra text to the end where I'm like

"Ha, ha, This isn't how I actually spell my name."

Also, side note, apologies to any "Matt Pats" out there who spell their name with a double T.

Anyway, today we're talking about Death note since Netflix just released a live-action Death Note movie

and since I'm writing this episode before it comes out, let me just cover my bases here.

"Man, It was the worst! I mean, L in public, Light second-guessing himself,

I can't believe that they didn't stay true to the original anime!"

Or..

"Wow! It was so great, right? Ryuk was PERFECT and they nailed Misa's character."

Sorry, I hate to make you guys work like that

But I thank you for going the extra mile and inserting the appropriate of the two responses.

So let me just put this out there: I love, LOVE the original anime!

It's like 25 of the best written episodes ever put to a TV screen.

"But Matpat there are actually 37 episodes."

Like I said, 25 of the most tense, densely plotted episodes ever put to air.

For those of you unfamiliar, main character Light Yagami has it all;

the top grades in his class the attention of all his female

classmates and a magical notebook that has the ability to kill people when he writes their names in it. Okay.

So, one of those things is not quite like the others. Unlike most people who get kind of icky over the prospect of killing people

with the flick of a pen, Light sees this as his opportunity to

Purify the world of Evil. Taking out all the world's criminals and in the process becoming the vigilante known as Kira. And no,

That's not a racist way of saying killer. His name is actually Kira. Along the way,

He attracts copycat killers and plays an intense game of Cat-And-Mouse against the Brilliant deductive mind of a mysterious

Detective known only as L. It is without

Question my favorite anime. But as I get ready to watch the Netflix movie, it suddenly occurred to me

We spend so much time zoomed in on the personal conflicts between Light and L, that we as the audience

Lose sight the larger conflict here just how many killings are happening over the course of the series light has some epic montage

Sequences well about is that because you can get when the action consists of writing people's names down the entire point of these?

Montages is to illustrate the extent of these killing sprees

but when it comes to the question of how many

Names were actually written into the death note things kind of get blurry so today

I'm working to get the best estimate possible for how many lives like cut short during his reign as Kira now

I say estimate since most of his killing occurs off screen meaning we can never get a hundred percent accurate number that said though

We can get close if we know one the duration of time during which Kira's active and to the rate at which, Kira Kills

So number one how long does Kira kill for well?

It's a simple question that has a complicated answer you see for one thing

There are a total of four people who operate under the Kira alias at one point or another as light creates these

Complex Notebook handoffs and his attempt to evade capture making matters worse

Is that sometimes multiple Kira's are active at the same time with as many as three death notes at play?

Fortunately we have access to the complete time-stamped list of all the major events that happen throughout the series

Thanks to the handy time line that was printed in the bonus thirteenth volume of the manga and it bears mentioning that yes

This is a timeline covering the manga however it tells the exact same story as the anime only time shifted three years earlier because it

Came out first. They kept the months and days consistent from Manga to anime only changing the year by three years

So really the absolute time that Kira is active remains the same so now spoiler alert

I'm about to show you a timeline mapping out the whole series so go binge watch it, and then come back here seriously

It'll be a great weekend activity for you everyone back great and here

It is yep

It is a lot six years of killing spread across four main Kira's using three separate notebooks and a partridge in a pear tree

Add to that the police the mafia and hoo boy it is more confusing than light playing musical notebooks in the woods

But at this point

we have a solid idea of how long each of the kira's was an operation as expected light was the longest at

2030 three Total days Second Kira model and actress, Misa

Amane is only active for 60 seven days primarily because she was less interested in killing for justice and more interested in getting into lights

life Lights life Kyousuke-shi Gucci is Kira 3.0 active for

136 days and finally Tear Tomica me a devoted disciple of Tierra holds the note for the shortest amount of time only 61 days

But he's also the most enthusiastic

about it

Well, ho backspace on up there buddy because now that we know who had a death note and for how long we can calculate how

Many people each of them killed based on their rates of killing man if this video doesn't get flagged by YouTube's as being an advertiser

Unfriendly, it will be a miracle

So the key to estimating lights rate of killing lies in this first encounter with Ryu late shinigami or god of death when Ryo first

Appears we learned that lights been writing the names of criminals in the death note for five days several death notes

Have made their way into the human world in the past

But you're the first to a britain has many names look at how many people you killed in only five days

The show gives us a glimpse of his open notebook where we can observe that he writes names divided into four Columns and 39 Rows

each that's a total of

156 names per page that clip also shows us that lights already completed two full pages a total of three hundred and twelve names if

We take the lowball estimate and assume that light only has filled those two pages in the five days then the average

Comes out to sixty two point four names per day now realize that this is only an average light obviously isn't writing exactly

62 names every single day for instance there's one day where he kills exactly 24 criminals one every hour to make a very specific point?

To L and then on the days where he's under surveillance he probably kills fewer criminals

But we also know that light likes to cue up criminals to die even on days when he's not

diligently writing names in his death note

So what matters here is the average not the exact he writes down on any given day so that?

62.4 is a good baseline then comes the five year intermission after light defeats L, during which light is acting completely

Uncontested assuming the role of Kyra and knight and the role of the new L

During the day and as he can imagine since he's a serial killer leading a task force out to catch him

He's not too good at his day job during this period A narrator tells us that the Kira killings accelerate in the summer according to

his killings increased at an unprecedented rate its first five days as Kira are a pretty good representation of what an

Unimpeded Kira looks like he comes from from school does his homework and then spends the rest of his free time

Writing names in his notebook like a lovesick middle schooler when like two feet zell

He still has to perform his day job with the police task force and at night Misa is also distracting him wink wink

Don't you hate it when the blonde actress slash model who adores everything that you do pulls you away from your nightly killing spree

So let's assume that the rate of his killings during this period Doubles per day

It's nothing too extreme just an extra 60 or so names at night because he has misa helping him do research running those numbers across

This two thousand Thirty three days as Kira gives us two hundred and forty two

Thousand one hundred and Twelve names in the book hold up two hundred and forty two

thousand approximately sixty two names per day times 365 days

Doubling for when L is defeated and run back for five years yeah that number checks out

And that's a conservative estimate think about that two hundred thousand names

That's more than the populations of forty seven separate countries in fact near the end of the series near yeah

His name is actually near calls the death note the deadliest weapon of Mass murder in the history of Mankind

That's a pretty tall order, but when you actually look at the numbers. It's true the third death note alone

The one light yagami used during his five years

uncontested killed more people than the atomic bomb dropped on hiroshima at the end of world war two which was itself the

Single deadliest attack in recorded history in the end. You're nothing more than a crazy serial killer

No, light is much more dangerous the term serial killer specifically excludes war crimes and government sanctioned killings and by that definition

Kira comes out on top by A

huge Margin some of the deadliest serial killers in recorded history Luis Guerra Beto and pedro Lopez have fewer than

200 known victims while Kira's number in the hundreds of thousands even the deadliest conventional serial killers are around only

One-tenth of one percent as deadly as Kira, and that is just light

We still have three other kilos uh Kira's

To discuss mises number is just a drop in the bucket compared to lights killing spree only around

400 she had a short run and only killed for attention any killings that she does do during that five year intermission period Are more

For helping out lights total because he's the type of person who wouldn't allow that power to anyone else

He probably wants to save her all that writing to himself and as we see during the montage for that segment

They're both on computers together researching

But he's the only one that we ever see writing names when the audience learns that Gucci is the third Kira

We see his notebook laid out on the table

And it shows that he's written a total of 64 names 16 rows across four columns if that's what's in a day's work for

Higuchi

Then that would make his daily body count almost

Exactly the same as what we calculated for light earlier an average of 64 names per day times

136 Days works out to eight thousand seven hundred and four people dead at a Higuchi's hands. And lastly taro Myka me out of all

The Kira's Mikami holds his death note for the fewest number of days

But he fills in one page per day. That might not sound like much,

but one page for Mikami is serious business. With over six columns and

Seventy-six Rows per page Mikami is executing a whopping

456 people every Single Day

I'm not sure what's more Impressive?

the number of names that mikami manages to write every day or that he manages to squeeze them all in there?

Maybe might not be the brightest when it comes to executing light's strategy,

but you've got to give this guy points for penmanship! With a total of 61 active days mikami's total kill count tallies in at

27,816!

27,000 people in two months! So to recap our tallies are Light Yagami, 242,112

Misa Amane, 392

Kyosuke Higuchi, 8704

And Teru Mikami, 27,816

adding up to just under 280,000

total victims

280,000 people dead!

To give you a point of comparison, that is just shy of the

300,000 Americans who died during World War one.

The only wars to kill more U.S soldiers were world war one, two, and the Civil war

And remember, this estimate is a conservative number we don't see proof of it

but misa could absolutely be more active during that five year intermission if light allowed her to be

And light himself could definitely be more aggressive in his writing

if he wanted to be. For an even better comparison of the vastness of the number of people these guys are killing, consider this.

When we see lights notebook open, Yes

We see some western names

But there's also a few names written in

Japanese. This makes total sense since the series is set in Japan and lights first language is Japanese

So it would just be an easier place for him to Target

In 2009 Japan's Prison population was seventy five thousand two hundred fifty.

Just a fourth of Kira's Total kill count in other words during his six years

He could have exterminated Japan's entire prison population and still had time to deal with the rest of the world's criminals

that said the U.S has a

Few more people in prison. Two million two hundred seventy thousand to be exact so even if Kira's efforts were entirely

Concentrated on the U.S, It would have only been around thirteen percent of the total us prison population

Furthermore worldwide there are eight hundred and seventy four thousand one hundred people murdered last year

Holy Jeez that's a huge number

So even if Kira only targeted murders his total number of killings over six years

Would only be thirty two percent of the total number of murders in one year. Ho Boy

Hide your kids, hide your wives. Hide your kids, hide your wives.

The world is kind of a scary place sometimes.

And I gotta be honest. Light, for all his purging the world talk, made it a bit

Scarier. You see, even though he sees himself as the embodiment of justice..