Zac Efron practically confirmed for Light in Death Note movie.

Yes, Dragonball, I'm looking at you. It was basically a kung-fu movie that they thought "man, this seems pretty crappy. How can we make this sell better? Oh, I know! Get a popular title for it!"

So they got the license to make it. They change up the storyline they previously created to fit the context more and slap on character names. There you go, DB movie!

That might as well be what happened.

I can't believe that crap warranted a sequel as well and even THOUGHT it could become a successful movie franchise by adding stupid sequel baiting with the crap about Piccolo being healed by a woman he spared from killing after the awesome Ayumi Hamasaki song played in the credits. From what I understand, the second one is on it's way. That one is based on the first episodes/chapters of DBZ with the whole Raditz storyline. Maybe then it could see the justified light of accuracy.... oh wait, this isn't Dragonball.

Goku was changed to generic high school student #9001; Goku learns the so-called Kamehameha airbending technique because Chichi goads him on with either a kiss or some innuendo (I don't recall this movie very well). Since when would Goku do that? Oh right, never.

Jesus Christ, why is Chi-Chi given a complex about her name? What does her name have to do with this conversation anyways?

Some other character changes:
-Yamcha is a surfer bum who digs holes in the desert to scam nubz into paying him to free them out from these traps.
-Roshi. Everything physically about him is outright off. They tried to work in him being perverted, but it's just a light reference of him having magazines and that's it. Chow Yun-Fat as Roshi struck me as a tacky souveneir salesman in his acting.

The dialogue is outright horrible; here's my favorite example:
Chi-Chi: Did you do that?
Goku: Uh yeah. It was something my Grandpa taught me.
Chi-Chi: Ki?
Goku: (Shocked) You know about ki?
Chi-Chi: Just because my name is Chi-Chi doesn’t mean I’m an idiot.


Too lazy to account everything bad about it right now, so I'll leave it at this.

Actually, I think that if anything, Death Note could probably fare a lot better as an adaption. Reason being because of how many story arcs Dragonball had, and which ones they wanted to nitpick from to have somewhat of a conclusive end for a single ending; which made it hard to figure out how to treat the source material. Dragonball's obviously a little more far-fetched: anthropomorphic characters, bizarre hair colors and hair styles, and so forth. Death Note doesn't run into these problems as much.