Summary
Final Destination’slatest entry just hit theaters. Its producer admitted that he wasn’t a huge fan of all the films released in the franchise.
Final Destinationis one of the most successful supernatural horror thrillers in Hollywood. Fans love its compelling storytelling, which usually follows a group of people with one of them experiencing premonitions leading them to escape death. However, as they said, “no one cheats death,” so after surviving, they find themselves in survival mode as they continue to encounter dangerous situations that, more often than not lead eventually lead to their deaths. Six movies have been released already –Final Destination (2000), Final Destination 2 (2003), Final Destination 3 (2006), The Final Destination (2009), Final Destination 5 (2011), and Final Destination: Bloodlines (2025). Craig Perry,the Final Destinationproducer, shared his least favorite.
Perry got candid about the franchise in the new book “Screaming and Conjuring: The Resurrection and Unstoppable Rise of the Modern Horror Movie.” He admitted that the fourth movie was bad and thought it would end the franchise. However, he was grateful that it wasn’t that bad because they were able to produce another film after that. “I don’t think the fourth one is good at all, actually it sucks,” Perry said in an excerpt obtained by Entertainment Weekly. “But it was successful enough to give us a chance to redeem ourselves with 5.” The franchise has seemingly bounced back and is definitely back in the game.Final Destination Bloodlinesbroke recordsby grossing $51 million in North America and a similar amount globally. It was reportedly the biggest opening weekend for all films under the franchise. Its box office performance suggests the sixth entry,Bloodlines, is great.
The fourth movie,The Final Destination, was directed by David R. Ellis, known for high-octane and visually driven thrillers likeSnakes on a Plane. It was marketed as a standalone movie with the intention of wrapping up the series. It follows Nick O’Bannon (Bobby Campo), who has premonitions of a catastrophic car crash at a racetrack. He and his friends, along with some spectators, went out of the stadium and avoided death. However, Death starts to kill the survivors in gruesome ways in the order they would have died in the original disaster. While it followed the franchise’s core formula — a young protagonist having visions of a deadly accident — the characters were not well-written, and the story was not compelling enough for the audience to care.
Perry has a point in his criticism ofFinal Destination 4, which is something that many will probably agree with. This is evident in its poor ratings onRotten Tomatoes. The horror film has the lowest ratings among all films, with only a 28% score from the critics and 35% from the audience. The biggest mistake was probably the way the characters were written. The film was so focused on featuring gruesome deaths and highlighting the protagonist’s premonitions that it seemed to forget the importance of character development. For this reason, the characters appeared flat and uninteresting, and the audience didn’t care about them, much less about whether they died or survived. Without a compelling story, the gory deaths were not as impactful. Also, it didn’t help that they cast unpopular actors, whose performances were not convincing. Overall, many didn’t like the film and considered it the weakest entry in the franchise due to shallow and underdeveloped characters, weak dialogue and acting, overuse of 3D effects, and the lack of emotional investment in the characters, which made their deaths insignificant. In contrast,Final Destination Bloodlineshas received positive feedback from both critics and the audience.
