Latest news with #CraigPerry
New York Post
17-05-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Post
‘Final Destination' producer reveals which film in the franchise he thinks ‘sucks'
Sometimes the journey is more important than the destination. And for producer Craig Perry, creating the fourth film in the 'Final Destination' franchise might have been a good time, but the movie, which he thought would be their final flick, wasn't his favorite. 'I figured that we're done,' Perry shared, per an exclusive excerpt from Clark Collis' 'Screaming and Conjuring: The Resurrection and Unstoppable Rise of the Modern Horror Movie,' per Entertainment Weekly. 'Then, lo and behold, opening weekend, we're like, 'Uh, okay, here we go.'' Advertisement 5 Craig Perry attends the World Premiere of Warner Bros 'Final Destination Bloodlines' at TCL Chinese Theatre on May 12, 2025 in Hollywood, California. FilmMagic 'I don't think the fourth one is good at all, actually it sucks,' admitted the producer. 'But it was successful enough to give us a chance to redeem ourselves with 5.' The horror series started in 2000 with 'Final Destination,' then 'Final Destination 2' (2003), 'Final Destination 3' (2006), 'The Final Destination' in 2009, 'Final Destination 5' in 2011 and the sixth film, 'Final Destination Bloodlines,' which hit theaters on Friday. Advertisement Collis, a former Entertainment Weekly reporter, explores the horror genre in his upcoming book, which hits stands Sept. 2, 2025. 5 Screaming and Conjuring: The Resurrection and Unstoppable Rise of the Modern Horror Movie. 1984 Publishing The book 'reveals the challenging and often chaotic production stories behind these films, offering readers an inside look at the creative turbulence and triumphs that brought these landmark movies to life,' per an official synopsis. ''Final Destination' starred Devon Sawa as a New York high school student named Alex who receives a premonition that the Paris-bound plane he has just boarded will catch fire in the air. After Alex, some of his classmates, and a teacher disembark, the plane does indeed explode,' an excerpt from the book read. 'During the days that follow, the survivors start passing away and Alex realizes they are being murdered by the Grim Reaper.' Advertisement The original film was created by Jeffrey Reddick, who shared, 'The original idea came from an article I read about a woman who was on vacation and her mother told her to switch flights because she had a bad feeling. The woman switched planes and the plane she was scheduled to be on crashed. So that idea stuck with me.' 5 'The Final Destination,' 2009. New Line/Kobal/Shutterstock 5 Haley Webb, and Nick Zano in 2009's 'The Final Destination.' New Line/Kobal/Shutterstock The creator, 55, was always a big fan of horror — especially Wes Craven's 'A Nightmare on Elm Street.' Advertisement 'I saw it in a double feature at a drive-in with 'Alone in the Dark,'' Reddick shared, per Collis' book. 'It just scared the hell out of me.' Diving into what led the journalist to write the publication, Collis told People on Tuesday, 'There are a lot of books about horror films from the '70s and '80s and I felt this period, too, deserved its own properly-researched history.' 5 Director David R. Ellis, actress Shantel VanSanten, actor Bobby Campo, writer Eric Bress, actress Haley Webb, executive producer Craig Perry and actor Nick Zano arrive on the red carpet of the Los Angeles premiere of 'The Final Destination' at the Mann Village Theatre on August 27, 2009 in Westwood, Los Angeles, California. WireImage 'I've taken a bird's-eye view of the whole horror film scene, from the release of the genre-reviving 'Scream' to the 2013 debut of 'The Conjuring,' which inaugurated the first multi-billion dollar horror movie franchise.'
The Guardian
01-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
The grisly return of Final Destination: ‘What are the everyday experiences we can ruin for people?'
'My inbox is filled with the most horrible ways people can die,' says Craig Perry, the producer – or, as he would prefer, 'curator' – of the Final Destination franchise. Over 25 years, his films have punctured, skewered, crushed, flattened and decapitated men, women and children in a series of horrifying 'accidents' and Perry has been a witness to them all. His friends clearly want him to witness many more. But as we speak on video call, just a few weeks before the sixth instalment is released, he seems far from traumatised. Instead, he's ebullient, buzzing infectiously about the many gory deaths he has overseen with the same enthusiasm other people might display when talking about their children ('If you're not having fun, don't do it!' he grins). He has every right to be proud. To date, the films have made more than $657m (£493m) worldwide and helped to terrify a generation of millennials about the dangers that arise not from entering a haunted house or swimming in shark-infested waters but from the mundanities of taking a shower or driving your car. In the Final Destination movies, death is everywhere. In the first film, released in the spring of 2000, it was on a plane and a teen, experiencing a gruesome premonition, sniffed it out early, saving himself and a handful of others as it exploded in front of them. But death soon followed them all home and constructed shocking, often grimly amusing, Rube Goldberg-style death sequences for them, correcting the imbalance. Sequels inevitably followed, kicking off with mayhem on the road, a rollercoaster, a racetrack and a suspension bridge. The original iteration of the script, once intended to be an X-Files episode, had personified death. But 'using inanimate objects to achieve its objective' is something Perry believes has given the series its staying power. 'It allows the audience to bring whatever baggage or notions that they have about death,' he tells me. 'It could be cultural or personal or that moment two years ago when they had a near miss and thought, man, if I just stepped right or left, that would have been the end of it. You bring all that to the movie and it makes it yours. Your experience is unique to you.' In the latest film, Final Destination: Bloodlines, the formula sees a slight shake-up. The film opens in the 1960s; the premonition-haver has found a way to cheat death for decades until the collapse of a space-needle restaurant that leads to the destruction of a whole family (instead of, as in earlier films, a group of teens or strangers). It was the brainchild of Spider-Man director Jon Watts, who then enlisted directing duo Adam Stein and Zach Lipovsky to breathe new life into a franchise that had been dormant for 14 years. The new film arrives at a time filled with nostalgia horror plays. The seventh chapter of the rebooted Scream franchise has just finished production, a rehaul of I Know What You Did Last Summer starring is out this July and an Urban Legend remake was announced last week. But masked slashers aside, is a new generation ready to be scared of, well, everything? Aren't they scared enough? Turns out, not nearly. 'What are the everyday experiences or everyday objects or everyday feelings that we can ruin for people?' asks Stein, speaking to me with his co-director on a break during the production of Freaks Underground, a sequel to their acclaimed 2018 breakout Freaks. No spoilers but as the trailers already suggest, this time prepare to be terrified of tattoo parlours, family barbecues, revolving doors and glass elevators. Inspiration comes to Perry not only via email, but to the entire creative team via the anxieties of everyday life – what if that fell, what if I fell, what if that fell while I was falling etc. 'It's those things that you run into in your daily life all the time and you just feel a little bit off about,' Lipovsky says (hint for the new film: his apartment overlooks an alley where garbage is frequently collected). Perry jokes that he 'can't walk into a room without doing a threat matrix'. While many of the death scenes might seem cartoonishly far-fetched, it's become surprisingly important for those involved to heavily research just how close to reality they could actually be. I mistakenly referred to a grisly scene involving a monstrously powerful magnetic resonance imaging machine, already teased at Comic-Con, as outlandish. I was corrected. Top-end MRIs, Perry tells me, 'can literally pull entire gurneys into them and fold them over. That's all true.' Lipovsky adds that he read up on some 'extremely tragic and horrible' stories in his research (think guns and wheelchairs sucked into machines). 'It all has to be stuff the audience generally would believe is possible,' he says. He goes on to tell me about extravagant crew tests involving mannequins. But how do you centre a film on the utter inescapability of death and not make it feel like a depressing slog? 'It's knowing without diminishing, if that makes sense,' Perry says. 'And this is why I think it's so hard. People don't realise how challenging the tone is in these movies.' Is he worried about increased sensitivities with a new generation (the first film featured a pre-9/11 plane crash and a grim shower death mistaken for a suicide)? 'One of the challenges with this storytelling in general is if you have to have trigger warnings for drama, that means you can't have an antagonist,' he says. 'Because antagonists, by their very nature, do terrible things.' He adds: 'I feel like if we get hamstrung by overanalysing that thing, we're just going to have movies that play like tapioca. It's just not going to be intriguing.' Stein agrees that it's 'incredibly tricky' to make so much carnage so much fun but the secret is in the bad guy, death. 'You kind of root for him because of his sense of humour,' he says. 'He's just so clever.' Despite the films forcing family members or partners to watch their loved ones get brutally splattered to smithereens in front of them, the franchise isn't really known for its humanity. Here, death doesn't mean all that much. But in the new film, it suddenly does. Tony Todd, who has appeared in all but one of the films (including a voice role in the third one), died in November last year, not long after filming a one-scene cameo. His on-screen farewell is a surprisingly moving moment, the actor looking strikingly frail. 'Everyone involved knew he was ill and we weren't sure at certain points whether he would be able to participate,' Stein tells me. 'It was a really unique moment because talking about his own death for the movie on this meta level, he's speaking to the fans about his death. And so in that moment when he had his final goodbye, we asked him if he would be able to kind of put the script away and do a take where he spoke from the heart about what death means and what life means … it's his honest words of wisdom direct to you.' It's a rare moving moment in a film that's otherwise as energetic and fun as the very best of the franchise. The first one turned 20 just after the pandemic kicked in and, with Bloodlines emerging as the world continues to burn in new and old ways, what purpose does a Final Destination film have in 2025? 'There's a lot of depressing things happening in the world,' Lipovsky says, believing that the film will take viewers to 'a different place outside the real world for a few hours'. Stein adds: 'The communal experience of watching this movie in a theatre is really something to behold. Twelve minutes in, when a little boy gets crushed by a falling piano, the entire audience erupts in cheers. And that is something really fun.' Final Destination: Bloodlines is out in UK cinemas on 14 May and in the US on 16 May
Yahoo
10-04-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Logicalis Joins Military Spouse Employment Partnership (MSEP)
TROY, Mich., April 10, 2025 /PRNewswire/ -- Logicalis US today announced their membership into the Military Spouse Employment Partnership (MSEP). The partnership is part of a US Department of Defense initiative that connects military spouses with partner employers committed to recruiting, hiring, promoting, and retaining military spouse talent. Through the partnership, Logicalis gains access to a pipeline of talented candidates and joins a community of like-minded employers focused on creating meaningful change. The program enables Logicalis to offer career development resources, remote work options, and advancement opportunities tailored to the needs of military spouses. "Logicalis is dedicated to supporting the careers of military spouses who bring invaluable skills and resilience to the workforce," said Craig Perry, Sr. Director, Talent Acquisition at Logicalis US. "We are proud to join MSEP as a testament to that commitment to creating meaningful opportunities for military families." MSEP is part of the broader Spouse Education and Career Opportunities (SECO) program, designed to help military spouses find meaningful employment and advance in their careers despite the unique challenges they face, such as frequent relocations and deployments. Since its inception in 2011, MSEP has partnered with more than 600 organizations and helped connect military spouses with over 275,000 job opportunities. "A commitment to military spouse employment is vital as it directly impacts the stability and well-being of military families who already sacrifice so much in service to our country," said Courtney Rothermel, Human Resources Business Partner at Logicalis US. "As a military spouse of 20 years, I've personally faced the uphill battle of finding meaningful employment each time we relocated, which often led to financial strain and additional stress during an already stressful time. There's more roadblocks than one might imagine. So, supporting military spouse employment isn't just a nice-to-have—it's an essential community initiative that honors the resilience of military families and helps build a stronger, more secure future for all." For more information about the MSEP program, visit: For more on Logicalis' military employment initiatives, visit: About Logicalis USWe are Architects of Change™. We help organizations succeed in a digital-first world. At Logicalis, we harness our collective technology expertise to help our clients build a blueprint for success, so they can deliver sustainable outcomes that matter. Our lifecycle services across cloud, connectivity, collaboration and security are designed to help optimize operations, reduce risk and empower employees. As a global technology service provider, we deliver next-generation digital managed services, to provide our clients with real-time visibility and actionable insights across the performance of their digital ecosystem including; availability, user experience, security, economic performance and sustainability. Our 7000+ 'Architects of Change' are based in 27 countries around the globe, helping our 10,000+ clients across a range of industry sectors, create sustainable outcomes through technology. Logicalis has annualized revenues of $1.7 billion, from operations in Europe, North America, Latin America, Asia Pacific, and Africa. It is a division of Datatec Limited, listed on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange, with revenues of over $4.6 billion. For more information visit View original content to download multimedia: SOURCE Logicalis Sign in to access your portfolio
