The ‘Final Destination' Films, Ranked from Worst to Best
Like it or not, 2025 is rapidly becoming the Year of the Freak Accident. In horror, everybody from audiences who loved 'The Monkey' to that very flammable fellow in 'The Rule of Jenny Pen' is feeling it. But there's even more to come when 'Final Destination' — the genre's most criminally underrated supernatural franchise — returns with scads more not-so-accidental death on May 16.
The aughts used to get a bad rap in pop culture, but that's improved somewhat in recent years. As filmmakers have released their death-grip obsession on the '80s, familiar faces and franchises from throughout the 2000s have reemerged across all types of movies and TV. Right now, for example, you can see the forty-something 'Veronica Mars' dating that forty-something guy from 'The O.C.' in a rom-com on Netflix that's been wildly popular — in spite of the title 'Nobody Wants This.'
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When it comes to nostalgia for aughts-era nightmares, specifically, 'Saw' is back and going on strong. 'The Strangers' is a multi-part melodrama… for some reason. And it might still be a way off but the long overdue 'Jennifer's Body' sequel seems practically imminent. Is it all an overdue artistic reevaluation of a bygone period suddenly realized? Or is it happening to us now…in this way…by some kind of…design?
Co-directed by Zach Lipovsky and Adam Stein, 'Final Destination: Bloodlines' is among this year's most anticipated horror releases — reviving the gory death-by-Rube-Goldberg-machine format that divided critics but never failed at the box office from 2000 to 2011. 'Bloodlines' is the sixth film in the series, which kicked off with the original movie directed by James Wong and distributed by New Line. The film celebrates its silver anniversary on March 17 and is based on an 'X-Files' spec script by Jeffrey Reddick.
The first 'Final Destination' crash-landed into theaters as an unconventional slasher, following a kid (Devon Sawa) who acts fast after getting a terrifying premonition while boarding a plane to Paris. He'll live to regret it… for a while anyway… as Death's Design hunts down each and every shouldn't-have-been survivor from the ill-fated Flight 180. By swapping the typical masked villain for an unseen lethal presence — lore-dumped about in the films by the late-great Tony Todd — Reddick and Wong uncovered a brilliant new method of making kills their movie's main event. The formula that emerged (mass casualty event + freak accident ^nth power = fine enough FD sequel) worked well for a decade and got an added layer of intrigue with a twist-ending that brought the events of 'Final Destination 5' full circle.
From an Olympic-qualifying spine snap to a tanning bed/casket jump-cut you'll feel in your toes, the grisly freak accidents that make 'Final Destination' memorable have aged with varying degrees of success. We don't need to see another pool drain suck organs out of some asshole's butt… and yet, we're not saying 'no' to another 'Final Destination 2' logging truck incident. (It's the film that still haunts America's freeways!) Ranked worst to best, these are the five 'Final Destination' films 25 years since it all began. —Alison Foreman
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