The post-production for Death Note was not nearly as exaggerated as that of a hot-blooded battle series filled with explosive fights, but even so, trying to get it into theaters during the big October holiday slot was simply impossible.
Some stories out there were ridiculous. A movie would finish filming, and one month later, it would already be in theaters. If that were normal, what were all those poor projects supposed to feel after spending years negotiating with theater chains, distributors, and platforms until every last bit of patience had been squeezed dry?
After several discussions with NetFi, which had also joined as an investor, as well as other Western giants involved in the project, everyone eventually reached a consensus: they would do everything possible to release the film within two months, aiming for the Christmas season.
With that settled, Alex flew back home to personally oversee the post-production.
In truth, the local visual effects industry had already reached a fairly solid level. In Death Note, the most important effects were basically concentrated on Ryuk and Rem, the two gods of death. It was not the kind of production that required endless rivers of money.
Besides, Alex had another urgent matter to handle after returning.
Casting for the new series.
Soul Reaper had already ended. No matter how reluctant he felt to part with that work, he needed to raise another heavyweight IP as soon as possible, something capable of sustaining and expanding his two-dimensional empire.
"Good morning, boss!"
The moment he stepped into the company, the employees around him lit up as if they had just seen a star descend from the heavens. One after another, they greeted him with voices full of energy.
Anyone watching from the outside might have thought he had walked into some kind of corporate cult.
But when he thought about it, it was not that hard to understand. In his previous life, obsessive anime fans often saw voice actors through the filter of the characters they played. With Alex, that filter was even more absurd.
After all, the face people projected onto him was not merely that of a voice actor associated with a famous role.
It was the face of Sosuke Aizen.
And also Dio.
The problem was that Alex did not know whether that sparkle in the fans' eyes would survive once the second half of Death Note premiered. When they saw just how despicable Light Yagami became afterward, that filter might suffer a serious blow.
To be honest, even Alex himself wanted to kill Light when he thought about the things he would do in the final part of the story.
After returning to his familiar office and sitting behind the desk he had not seen in some time, Alex let out a long breath. He turned on the computer, opened his files, and began organizing the scripts.
The next IP capable of carrying the weight left behind by Soul Reaper.
With a few clicks, he opened the folder labeled Classic Battle Shonen.
Inside it, five scripts lay quietly.
Naruto.
Inuyasha.
Fate.
One Piece.
One Punch Man.
In his previous life, after the era of influencers and traffic-driven entertainment had taken over everything, many people claimed that the age of classic hot-blooded battle shonen was over. Then works like Demon Slayer and Jujutsu Kaisen appeared and slapped those people hard across the face.
The truth was simple: some genres simply did not die.
If your work was boring, do not blame the genre.
Even so, Alex still felt that works born in that traffic era, like Demon Slayer and Jujutsu Kaisen, remained some distance away from their great predecessors. No matter how good they were, one could still see the shadows of the old giants within them.
Heirs always carried less impact than founders.
"Hmm… this one, better not."
After resting his chin on his left hand and thinking for a while, Alex dragged One Piece into the recycle bin before all the others.
In his previous life, he had been a die-hard fan of One Piece. Die-hard to the point that he had once dreamed of doing some very improper things with Hancock. But after the Wano arc… no, to be more precise, after Momonosuke appeared, something about the tone of the work began to feel wrong.
Later, Kozuki Oden and the Nika Fruit arrived with even heavier force.
It made people wonder whether Oda had drunk too much of his own creative freedom.
Of course, even if the story had not taken those strange turns, Alex still had no intention of adapting One Piece.
The difficulty was far too high.
As for the remaining four scripts, he had also left notes about the roles he could play.
In Naruto, Madara Uchiha.
In Inuyasha, Sesshomaru.
In One Punch Man, Saitama.
In Fate, Gilgamesh or Kiritsugu Emiya.
Madara needed no introduction. Alongside Sosuke Aizen, he was one of the two great kings of overwhelming presence in the world of anime, comics, and games. If any characters could compete with those two in sheer oppressive aura, they were probably only the Saiyan fusions Gogeta and Vegito.
Sesshomaru, on the other hand, was not exactly the type of character who "posed" to look powerful. He was simply elegant, cold, and beautiful in an almost natural way. On top of that, he carried a somewhat tragic streak of bad luck.
After all, the man worked so hard to develop the Meido Zangetsuha, only for the technique to end up becoming a gift for Inuyasha.
When Alex saw that in his previous life, he felt that if he had been Sesshomaru, he would have wanted to dig up his own father's grave just to ask what the hell had been going through his head.
As for Fate, if it were the Stay Night route, Alex would never agree to play Gilgamesh. The character's majestic aura there had already sunk so low it had gone through the floor. But in Zero, his performance was still tolerable. Arrogant, venomous, foul-mouthed, but at least not completely ridiculous.
Kiritsugu Emiya was also within his range of consideration. And of course, that had absolutely nothing to do with Alex envying that bastard for having a beautiful wife, an adorable daughter, and an ambiguous relationship with his own female assistant.
As for Saitama, Alex considered him the most innovative, unique, and relatable protagonist among all modern shonen leads.
He was a hero for fun.
That was all.
The world could try to shove moral responsibility onto his shoulders, but he would never agree to carry everyone else's emotional garbage just because he had chosen to act as a hero.
When Saitama faced an attempt at moral blackmail and responded with that brutal honesty, Alex, in his previous life, began to look at that egg-headed man in an entirely different way.
Tanjiro, Yuji Itadori, all of them carried strong traces of classic shonen protagonists. One could see the roots of an older tradition in them.
But Saitama was different.
Truly different.
Unfortunately, in his previous life, the second season of the anime had buried part of the work's potential, and Murata had started playing around too much with the story.
Such a good script written by ONE, wasted like that.
Damn it.
In the end, after thinking it over for a long while, Alex's gaze settled on two scripts.
Naruto and One Punch Man.
They were the two most qualified works to succeed Soul Reaper.
The Naruto script in his hands followed the structure of the original. Of course, for the moment, he had only written up to the end of the young era, concluding with the battle at the Valley of the End.
Among the three great shonen pillars, many people said One Piece reached its peak in the middle, especially during Water Seven and the Marineford War. Naruto and Soul Reaper, on the other hand, had started almost too strongly.
For Naruto, there was the Chunin Exam and the Sasuke Retrieval arc.
For Soul Reaper, there was the Soul Society arc and the rise of Aizen.
Because of that, Alex initially thought the young era of Naruto did not need major changes.
But after spending half an hour rereading everything from beginning to end, his expression grew darker and darker.
Because he knew the later plot.
And precisely because he knew Shippuden, he could clearly see just how many flaws existed in the young era.
The first problem lay with the protagonist, Naruto Uzumaki.
Why did everyone know he was a jinchuriki?
Shouldn't that kind of information have been hidden at all costs?
Then there was the Third Hokage, Hiruzen Sarutobi. So was that old man good or bad?
On the surface of the original work, he undoubtedly seemed like a good person. But he knew Naruto's true identity. So why did he spend twelve years simply watching from the sidelines, as if he were eating popcorn in front of a drama?
If Minato had not acted that day, the entire village might have been destroyed. Would Hiruzen even have had the chance to keep sitting in that chair?
And yet, the old man could not even increase the boy's allowance a little, to the point that Naruto ended up drinking expired milk.
No wonder so many fanfics turned Hiruzen into a villain down to his bones.
Just from the way Naruto's childhood had been handled, there was no way to fully clean up his image.
And Kakashi? And Jiraiya?
One was a direct disciple, the other was the master of the boy's father. During all those years, had the two of them also just stood by and watched from afar? Apparently, all their energy had gone into questionable adult novels and peeping at women's baths.
Finally, there was Itachi Uchiha.
That guy also needed to be rewritten.
There were rumors that Kishimoto had originally planned Itachi as a pure villain, but after his popularity grew too high, he simply turned him into an "undercover agent."
Wonderful.
Apparently, other authors had learned that trick from him.
Alex let out another long sigh and began correcting the holes in the script.
The issue of Naruto's identity as a jinchuriki being known was adjusted in a more logical way: when Naruto was three years old, he had lost control once, and many villagers had directly witnessed the incident. That was why the secret had leaked.
In his previous life, it seemed some official Naruto material had already used a similar patch.
And to be fair, that patch made sense.
The expired milk detail was also removed.
It was necessary to emphasize the loneliness and hardship of the protagonist's childhood, but exaggerating too much would turn tragedy into absurdity.
As for the Third Hokage, Alex decided to shape him as a ruler who had begun wise and ended decadent. One of those leaders who, at first, possessed vision, strength, and merit, but over time became hesitant, muddled, and trapped by his own past.
There was not much else to do.
The old man had made too many terrible mistakes.
Even Alex, as someone who knew the entire story and had the advantage of reorganizing it, could not completely wash him clean.
As for Itachi Uchiha, the greatest "filial son" in the entire world of Naruto - perhaps even in all of anime - Alex could only apologize silently.
Sorry, brother.
You are going back to your original concept.
You will be a despicable villain.
Someone who killed his own father and mother for personal desire, distorted convictions, and an arrogance disguised as sacrifice.
By the time Alex finally finished patching most of the problems in the young era, he raised his eyes toward the window.
Outside, night had already swallowed the sky.
He looked again at the lower right corner of the screen.
Five hours of nonstop typing.
Almost half the daily output of certain miserable webnovel authors.
"With this, Shippuden will need a huge rewrite too… damn it, there won't be enough time."
Alex yawned and rubbed his forehead, feeling pain throb behind his eyes.
Then he turned his attention back to One Punch Man and Inuyasha.
The former, with ONE's script, was practically perfect. No exaggeration. It did not need Alex, a smug transmigrator, to touch it at all.
The latter did not have any major structural problems either. What it had was excess. Too many branches, too many episodes, too many subplots unrelated to the main line, all of which would need to be cut in large quantities.
"Thinking about it… would the Inuyasha script even pass a modern review?"
Soon after, Alex began worrying about another point.
Rin, Sesshomaru's canon partner, had first appeared when she was six or eight years old, right?
And in the end, she even had children with him.
That… did that not sound a little too problematic for a contemporary adaptation?
The office door opened softly.
"Boss, your tea."
Nadia entered, probably for the countless time that day, bringing Alex a fresh cup.
Over the past six months, the second new star of the company had become increasingly skilled in her role as an assistant. Seeing Alex immersed in the script, she had spent the entire afternoon without saying a word. Whenever she noticed that the cup beside him was empty or that the tea had gone cold, she would quietly approach and refill it with hot tea.
Now, seeing that Alex had finally stopped typing and wore an expression of visible headache, Nadia quickly stepped forward and placed her slender fingers against his temples, carefully massaging him.
It was a pity that the little assistant's physical attributes were still somewhat modest. Otherwise, Alex might have enjoyed a much more luxurious kind of head support.
While enjoying Nadia's massage, Alex kept his eyes half-closed, fixed on the script.
There was far too much to correct.
Especially in Naruto.
Fortunately, although there were many problems, at least it did not contain any truly irritating elements.
Yes, Alex was thinking exactly of One Piece, which had pulled narrative monstrosities like Momonosuke, Kozuki Oden, and the Nika Fruit out of nowhere.
Sometimes, he truly suspected that after Naruto and Soul Reaper ended one after another, Oda had lost any worthy rivals and simply decided to remove every restraint on himself.
"Boss, there's something I forgot to tell you."
Nadia, still massaging his head, suddenly seemed to remember something.
"Mason invited you to attend the Social Media Night awards ceremony."
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