10 Frightening Facts About the ‘Final Destination’ Franchise

When Final Destination was released in March 2000, it represented a clever new spin on the teen horror subgenre. It didn’t revive the format—that honor had already gone to 1996’s Scream, which inspired a string of late-’90s slasher films such as I Know What You Did Last Summer, Urban Legend, and the criminally underappreciated Cherry Falls. But Final Destination found an inventive way to supply the blood-red meat of the slasher flick—gory, on-screen deaths—without what was, until then, a key ingredient: a slasher. Rather than a human (or at least humanoid) killer, the antagonist in the Final Destination films is simply Death itself.

The concept was both novel and unsettling enough to resonate with audiences, and the franchise is still going strong a quarter of a century later. To celebrate its 25th anniversary, here are 10 things you might not know about the Final Destination series.

1. Final Destination started as an X-Files script.
2. The original script was more adult oriented, but Scream changed everything.
3. Jeffrey Riddick’s original script for 2000’s Final Destination was much darker.
4. Clive Barker was approached to direct the first installment.
5. The studio was uncomfortable with the idea of an invisible threat rather than a photographable killer.
6. Many characters in early installments are named after famous horror filmmakers.
7. Final Destination 2’s opening disaster has been called “the scene that traumatized a generation.”
8. A Final Destination 5 poster was banned in the UK after it made young children cry.
9. Dogs are off limits (so far).
10. The directors of 2025’s Final Destination: Bloodlines got the job by faking a decapitation during a Zoom pitch meeting with studio executives.

Final Destination started as an X-Files script.

According to series creator Jeffrey Reddick, the seeds of the original Final Destination were planted during a flight home to his native Kentucky. During the flight, Reddick read an article about a woman whose life was supposedly saved when she switched flights after her mother had a “bad feeling” about the flight she was originally scheduled to take. “I thought, that’s creepy—what if she was supposed to die on that flight?” Reddick said in a 2011 interview with Bloody Disgusting. That struck Reddick, who was then an aspiring screenwriter, as a perfect set-up for an X-Files episode, so he wrote it up as “Flight 180.” In that script, Scully’s brother Charles has a premonition that a plane he has just boarded is going to explode. After he and a few other passengers deplane, the flight does indeed crash. When the flight’s defectors begin dying in what appear to be freak accidents, Scully and Mulder are called in to investigate.

But the original 58-page script [PDF] never made it in front of X-Files producers. In 1994, Reddick was an executive assistant at New Line Cinema, which had hit it big 10 years earlier with A Nightmare on Elm Street. His coworkers there suggested the idea would be better served as a feature, so Reddick turned his TV script into a movie treatment that New Line finally bought in 1997.

The original script was more adult oriented, but Scream changed everything.

In Reddick’s original television script, everyone who deboards the plane and cheats death, only to die violently in the following days, is an adult. But by the time New Line bought Reddick’s film treatment and hired him to write the screenplay, Scream had dramatically altered the horror-movie landscape, reviving the teen horror that had thrived in the ’80s. “Teenagers were hot again in horror films,” Reddick told Consequence of Sound for a 2020 oral history of the Final Destination franchise. “New Line wanted to make them all teenagers.”

Reddick’s main character became 18-year-old Alex Henderson, later renamed Alex Browning, who would be played by Devon Sawa in 2000’s Final Destination.

Jeffrey Riddick’s original script for 2000’s Final Destination was much darker.

The Final Destination franchise is known for its elaborate, gory deaths—characters are impaled, decapitated, crushed, incinerated, run over, sliced up, riddled with nails, folded in half, and so on. Often, though, the deaths are so cartoonish that they’re not particularly disturbing. Tonally, the franchise has more in common with Looney Tunes than Longlegs.

The characters in Jeffrey Reddick’s original script suffered fates that weren’t meant to elicit horrified giggles. “Since death had messed up the first time, it couldn’t just kill the people,” Reddick explained to Consequence of Sound. “It basically exploited their biggest fears and drove them to suicide.”

Clive Barker was approached to direct the first installment.

In that oral history, Reddick revealed that the first filmmaker approached to helm 2000’s Final Destination was none other than Clive Barker. Barker turned them down—he had essentially retired from directing features after clashing with studios over his two previous films, Nightbreed and Lord of Illusions. “Life’s too short to deal with these a**holes,” Barker told Entertainment Weekly in 2014, explaining his decision to step back from filmmaking.

Instead, directing duties fell to James Wong, an X-Files writer and producer who had made his directorial debut in 1996 with the episode “Musings of a Cigarette Smoking Man.” Final Destination was his first feature.

The studio was uncomfortable with the idea of an invisible threat rather than a photographable killer.

One of the things that sets the Final Destination franchise apart from other horror properties is the nature of the threat. There’s no killer lurking in the woods or stalking teenagers in their dreams; death can come by any means at any moment. It’s the reason the franchise has made us afraid of—well, pretty much everything.

That concept was introduced by Wong and his frequent collaborator Glen Morgan, who also worked on The X-Files. The pair had co-written some of that series’ most unsettling episodes, including the Season 1 skin-crawler “Squeeze” and Season 4’s now-infamous “Home.”

Ironically, the novelty of their concept was a sticking point for New Line Cinema. “They weren’t able to get their head around the idea of a movie where you didn’t see the killer, where death was a killer,” Reddick said in a 2020 interview with the pop-culture blog Indie Mac User. The studio wanted death to manifest itself in a physical, photographable way and suggested an elaborate melting-face vision that would precede each character’s death. The effect was abandoned when it proved to be too expensive. “Had we seen that or what death could look like, I don’t think we’d be talking right now. I think I’d be flipping burgers at In-N-Out,” said producer Craig Perry in 2020.

Many characters in early installments are named after famous horror filmmakers.

Throughout the franchise, the Final Destination films have paid homage to several decades worth of horror directors, producers, and actors. In the first installment, Devon Sawa’s Alex Browning, whose premonition of a disaster sets the plot in motion, is named for Tod Browning, who directed Universal’s seminal Dracula and MGM’s oft-banned Freaks. Kristen Cloke’s character, the ill-fated teacher Valerie Lewton, is an even less subtle reference to Val Lewton, the producer behind 1942’s Cat People and the following year’s I Walked with a Zombie. Amanda Detmer’s Terry Chaney is a nod to actors Lon Chaney and Lon Chaney Jr., while Chad Donella’s Tod Waggner name-checks both the aforementioned Tod Browning and The Wolf Man director George Waggner. (Tod is also the German word for “death.”) Seann William Scott’s character, Billy Hitchcock, is obvious enough. Other character names pay tribute to Nosferatu director F.W. Murnau and his star, Max Schreck.

Subsequent installments continued the trend with characters named after Roger Corman, John Carpenter, William Friedkin, George Romero, Tobe Hooper, and William Castle.

Final Destination 2’s opening disaster has been called “the scene that traumatized a generation.”

Most of the on-screen deaths in the Final Destination films are too cartoonish to be truly frightening or disturbing. It is, thankfully, hard to imagine laser eye surgery ending in mutilation, violent death, and a dislodged eyeball. (Though the folks at Lasik.com did feel the need to explain that “the chances of equipment malfunctioning in the way shown in the movie are virtually nonexistent.”)

The exception is usually the disaster that sets each installment in motion. Those scenes tend to be grounded in relatable fears—who hasn’t felt at least a little nervous on a bumpy flight or while driving across a lengthy suspension bridge? But there’s one Final Destination disaster that towers above the rest in the collective consciousness. If you google “scene that traumatized a generation,” the search engine will helpfully direct you to the logging truck scene in Final Destination 2, which turns a stretch of highway into a hellscape of burning cars, mangled bodies, and the screams of dying motorists.

According to Reddick, the Final Destination 2 cast of characters were originally meant to be trapped in a hotel fire during a spring-break road trip. But producer Craig Perry didn’t think that scenario was dramatic enough, so he challenged Reddick to raise the stakes. Reddick found the inspiration he was looking for during a trip home to Kentucky, when he ended up stuck behind a logging truck and pulled over. “I hate those things,” Reddick said in a 2020 interview with Horror Geek Life. While Reddick was parked on the side of the road, he called Perry. “I said, ‘What about a log truck on the freeway, and the chain breaks?’ And he’s like, ‘That’s it! That’s the opening.’ ”

Reddick has since cited it as his favorite opening in the franchise, and he seems delighted to have made countless drivers terrified of timber lorries. “Think of how many lives I’ve saved over the years by having people not drive behind log trucks,” he told The Guardian in 2021.

A Final Destination 5 poster was banned in the UK after it made young children cry.

In 2011, Warner Bros. was forced to rethink its promotional campaign for the UK home media release of Final Destination 5. The studio advertised the DVD release with a poster mounted in London buses and Tube stations featuring a skull with iron rods protruding from its mouth and eye sockets. According to The Guardian, 13 people issued complaints to the nation’s Advertising Standards Authority, including some who claimed the poster had made their young children “visibly upset.” Warner Bros. argued that the poster accurately represented the movie, which, fair enough—Final Destination 5 does, in fact, feature a character being impaled in his cranial region by rebar. The studio also insisted kids probably wouldn’t even notice the giant, mutilated skull because it wasn’t rendered in bright colors. The ASA found the studio’s argument unconvincing and ruled that the poster had to go.

Dogs are off limits (so far).

With more than 500 deaths across the first five installments, the Final Destination franchise might have the highest kill count of any horror series to date. But one demographic can rest easy, at least for now.

“I tried to kill a dog,” director James Wong told MovieWeb in 2006. “In the first {installment}, the dog that Clear had, that dog died. But after we tested the movie, everyone hated it so much; we had to shoot a few scenes where the dog lives.” Wong expressed reluctance to kill young children in the series, but babies apparently don’t count. In 2000’s Final Destination, an infant is pointedly among the passengers killed when Flight 180 explodes.

The directors of 2025’s Final Destination: Bloodlines got the job by faking a decapitation during a Zoom pitch meeting with studio executives.

In 2022, news broke that New Line Cinema had found its directors for Final Destination: Bloodlines, the first new installment to enter production since 2011’s Final Destination 5. The studio had hired Zach Lipovsky and Adam B. Stein, best known for their well-received 2018 science-fiction thriller Freaks. The Hollywood Reporter noted that the duo were already on the edge of securing the Final Destination job when a Zoom stunt put them over the top.

During a virtual pitch meeting, a fireplace behind Lipovsky and Stein apparently caused some genuine concern when it flared up and ignited the mantel. The duo managed to put the flames out, but, in classic Final Destination fashion, the fire was a misdirection; the real threat came from above, when a ceiling fan broke loose, crashed down, and beheaded one of the directors. It was, of course, an elaborate (and successful) audition staged by the filmmakers to demonstrate their enthusiasm for the project.

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