Final Destination at 25: How a slasher with no killer turned into a billion-dollar franchise

Australia Broadcast Center

14-05-2025

Welcome to Cheat Sheet, where we give you all the intel you need about iconic shows and films. In honour of its 25th anniversary and its new addition, this time we're looking at the deathly film franchise Final Destination.
The one certainty in life is that everyone is going to die. It might be brutal, it might be quick, it might be in 100 years from now or it could be tomorrow, but death is coming.
And no other franchise has capitalised on the finality and inevitability of death quite like Final Destination.
Riding the wave of Scream-fever at the turn of the millennium, the first Final Destination changed the slasher game by featuring no physical murderer. It is the essence of Death itself that infiltrates everyday objects to construct some of the most gruesome demises ever put to film.
Initially critically panned, Final Destination nearly quintupled its production costs by pulling in $US112 million at the worldwide box office. It would go on to spawn five sequels and a legion of dedicated fans.
Now, 25 years since its inception, Final Destination is back and out for blood.
Final Destination was never supposed to be a movie. Creator Jeffrey Reddick, a horror fan since childhood, penned an X-Files script in the hopes that it would attract an agent to represent him.
Titled 'Flight 180', the original story was inspired by a news article about a woman who avoided a plane crash by taking heed of her mother's warning that her original flight was going to explode. The film took the bizarre real-life incident a step further by introducing a cast of characters who are saved from an air crash after a premonition of their fiery ends, only for Death to come knocking for what he was denied.
Flight 180 was never submitted for The X-Files; instead, New Line bought Reddick's story and plopped it into the laps of two of the most prolific X-Files writers of all time, James Wong (who directed the first and third films) and Glen Morgan. Reddick credits Wong and Morgan with bringing the franchise's trademark Rube-Goldberg-esque set pieces to the table.
The first Final Destination established the structure that has served the series for a quarter of a century. A young person has a disaster premonition in a public place (plane, fairground, speedway etc.) then corrals friends and bystanders to leave just before it hits. The rest of the run time is spent trying to figure out who is next on Death's list and how to side-step a grisly end.
Final Destination has become a hugely successful franchise, bringing in $US663 million ($1.034 billion) since its inception 25 years ago, with almost every sequel bringing in over $US100 million (RIP Final Destination 2 for only grossing $US90 million).
In a scene awash with fierce final girls, Final Destination stands out for its sheer brutality.
It's a well worn trope in slasher films that someone survives at the end, but Final Destination chews through its protagonists like bubblegum, pioneering the shock hit-by-a-bus-style death that has not only been replicated within horror, but snaked its way into more PG fare.
Final Destination also introduced a slasher devoid of a killer. While at first it was unclear how to keep capitalising on an antagonist that couldn't be seen or fought, it has become an undeniably terrifying trademark of the series.
"That specific notion — that Death is an invisible force — is, I think, the thing that has allowed this franchise to continue for 20 years," producer Craig Perry told Digital Spy.
"It has allowed it to travel worldwide because every country, every culture, and every religion has a particular notion about life, death, fate and destiny."
But perhaps its largest impact lies outside the cinema, with the audiences that will never be able to look at everyday objects the same way.
"We all have thoughts in our head of things that could go wrong," Final Destination: Bloodlines director Adam Stein told The Screen Show's Jason Di Rosso
Final Destination: Bloodlines — the follow-up to 2011's fifth instalment — swaps high-school seniors for a more family affair. The big premonition scene takes place in 1968, with Death waiting decades to come after the descendants of Iris (Gabrielle Rose), the survivor of a deadly tower collapse.
Directors Stein and Zach Lipovsky confirmed that Bloodlines was a return to practical, show-stopping kills.
"There's one sequence where a character gets bent backwards to where the back of their head is touching their heels. We had the actor on one platform and a stunt person on a second platform right under them," Stein says.
"So when they get sucked into this machine, it looks like it's one person bending backwards. That's a very, very simple, old-style, almost-magic apparatus."
Bloodlines will also mark the final appearance of Tony Todd as William Bludworth. Beloved by the fanbase, the mysterious coroner pops up in every Final Destination except the third (although Todd's voice still features throughout) to lay exposition on the marked characters.
Todd, who portrayed the Candyman in the 1992 film of the same name, died in November 2024 — just months after Bloodlines filming wrapped.
"We all knew that he was obviously quite ill, and it was pretty clear that this was going to be the last role he would play in a movie," Perry told Deadline.
"And the fact that it was one of the Final Destination movies made it that much more poignant."
Warning: spoilers for the Final Destination series
Tod (Chad Donella) is the first survivor to die in the whole series, and his death sets the tone for decades to come. There are a few heart-stopping misdirections: a casual nick from a straight razor; even an ominous shadow on the shower curtain that suggests a looming physical being.
But in the end, Tod's demise comes from slipping and falling into a drying wire that lethally wraps around his neck. It's miles away from the viscera-filled kills of the modern films, but the true horror is in how easily you can imagine it happening in real life.
Final Destination saves its more outlandish death sequences for the opening premonition, and one of the most recognisable is in the second film in the series. Multiple characters are driving on a highway and end up in a fireball crash caused by a logging truck's cargo coming loose.
While all the deaths in the crash are remarkable, the best is the first: when a loose log falls from the truck and crashes through the windscreen of Officer Burke's (Michael Landes) car, eviscerating him into red chunks that fly out the back. Despite the fact Burke's death only occurs in a character's premonition it remains one of the most visceral of the entire series. Burke is one of the lucky characters who swerves his death, surviving the entire movie.
Poor Ashlyn and Ashley, doomed by their ditziness and their dedication to bronzed skin and an icy drink. It's Ashley's unfinished beverage dripping onto the controls of their tandem tanning bed that causes the temperature to rise in their fluorescent tombs.
Then the act of choosing some tunes kicks off a sequence of events that ends with a CD shelf sealing both their tanning tubes shut. All they can do is scream as the audience watches their skin bubble off their bodies. Just another reason to stay away from tanning beds.
So often the victims in Final Destination are innocent bystanders, so it's nice when death goes after a real jerk like Hunt Wynorski (Nick Zano). Hunt is a typical sexist meathead who doesn't respect Death, thinking he's protected from its wrath by his lucky coin.
After precariously placing a confiscated water gun on a pool pump at the local swimming haunt, Hunt dives in to retrieve his blessed coin only for the gun to fall on the switch that swaps blow with suck. Hunt is suctioned butt-first onto the pool's filter until his internal organs are… ummm removed and spurt out like gruesome confetti.
A horrible way to go but, on the other hand, he did not respect women (or Death).
Keeping with the punishment-for-perverts trend, slimy Isaac (PJ Byrne) enters the location of his death, a spa, and immediately harasses the young receptionist. It's OK though, because Issac is about to go through an ORDEAL that involves one of the most atrocious uses of acupuncture needles ever put to film.
After wincing through dozens of needles in his body and his table collapsing, Isaac thinks his nightmare is over, only for an incredibly heavy looking Buddha statue to come crashing down, squashing his head like a grape. That's what you get for calling Buddha fat.
Final Destination: Bloodlines releases into cinemas on May 15.