Final Destination
A teenager's premonition gets a handful of classmates off Flight 180 before it explodes, and then Death comes back for them, one elaborate accident at a time. Final Destination (March 2000) turned an unused X-Files spec script into a $113 million hit and a franchise whose Rube Goldberg death scenes made a generation nervous about every loose screw and dangling wire.
Jeffrey Reddick wrote the idea as a spec script for The X-Files, hoping it would land him a TV agent; someone at New Line Cinema suggested it should be a movie instead, and the studio bought the treatment. The survivors were adults in the original draft, changed to teenagers after Scream. X-Files writing partners James Wong and Glen Morgan rewrote it, and Wong made his feature directing debut with a stated goal: to do for planes and air travel what Jaws did for sharks and swimming. Devon Sawa plays Alex Browning, who sees Volée Airlines Flight 180 blow up before his class's trip to Paris, panics, and ends up off the plane with a few others, among them Clear Rivers (Ali Larter), Carter (Kerr Smith), and Billy Hitchcock (Seann William Scott). The plane explodes on schedule. Then Death comes for the survivors anyway. Tony Todd, cast partly for his voice, plays the mortician. The character names are horror in-jokes (Hitchcock, Browning, Lewton, Waggner), the plane set was a 45,000-pound cabin on a hydraulic gimbal, and the omen on the plane is John Denver's "Rocky Mountain High," because Denver died in a plane crash.
New Line released it on March 17, 2000. On a $23 million budget it opened third with $10 million and finished with $53.3 million domestic and $112.9 million worldwide. Critics split (51% on Rotten Tomatoes, a 39 on Metacritic, three stars from Roger Ebert), and it won the Saturn Award for Best Horror Film, with Sawa taking the younger-actor prize.
The sequels built the brand the first film only sketched: Final Destination 2 (January 2003), Final Destination 3 (February 2006), The Final Destination (2009, $187 million worldwide), and Final Destination 5 (2011), whose ending reveals that its doomed Paris flight is Flight 180. One of the original filmmakers has joked that the series "blew it" by never giving Death a body, because "there's no costume to buy, there's no action figure." The series looked finished until Final Destination Bloodlines (May 2025) earned $318 million and the franchise's best reviews, pushing the six films to about $986 million, New Line's third-biggest horror property after The Conjuring and It. A seventh is scheduled for 2028.
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