In case you’re worried—as I was—that the Final Destination franchise has been continuing on for years without your noticing, rest assured: Final Destination Bloodlines, due out May 16, is the first new entry in the series in 14 years. The first five movies ran from 2000 to 2011, meaning it’s been gone for longer than it was ever around. Until now! And, you know what? The trailer is fantastic.
For the uninitiated—and hold onto your pensions, but anyone under the age of 25 wasn’t born when the first movie came out—Final Destination was a tale of the repercussions of escaping death. A group of teenagers, boarding an airplane for a school trip, leave the plane after one of their number realizes he’s had a psychic premonition of the flight’s imminent explosion. And some concept of death appears to be most perturbed by this turn of events. They start dying, one by one, in increasingly ludicrous circumstances.
While it’s not yet known which event the cast of Bloodlines has escaped, one such ludicrous circumstance makes up the splendid trailer for the new movie. Be warned, it’s going to make you yell out loud:
Oh my oh my. Admittedly, there was a part of me that was hoping for the alternative gag, where despite all those events he then dies because he gets shot through the window or something. But still, that did the job.
Part of what made 2000’s Final Destination so great was the way it framed itself as one of the self-aware slasher flicks that emerged post-Scream, but without the masked killer. Removing the audience’s requirement to put their energies into solving a murder mystery and determining the identity of the villain, it offered a freeing viewing experience, one where the only obligations incumbent on viewers were pondering which elaborate confluence of events would lead to the next character’s grisly death. And then leaned in hard.
And it still holds up! Admittedly, the film’s most effective moment—the bus—has since been copied so much as to have been entirely neutered, to a degree where such moments are now woefully predictable. But there’s so much more besides, and it’s all delivered with a wink and a bucket of glee. It’s not a masterpiece, but it’s a really good time.
This was largely thanks to the writing team behind the movie: Glen Morgan and James Wong. Any fan of X-Files would immediately recognize those names, the ones you’d sit up in delight at seeing appear during the opening moments of an episode, because it meant it’d be an absolute gem. Despite all this, via what I contend was a snobbery that was rampant at the turn of the millennium, the movie was grimly reviewed, still sitting at a horrible 39 on Metacritic and 36 percent on Rotten Tomatoes.
This makes Final Destination one of the strangest horror franchises, as its review scores have climbed with each subsequent movie (other than the fourth, a 3D movie which was universally condemned, including by viewers), despite each generally being worse than the last. As the 11 years went on, perhaps critics became less performatively weary of Scream-likes, and just acknowledged they were being offered a silly good time.
It’ll be interesting to see whether this sixth film will be met with that sense of pre-ordained exhaustion that too often accompanies a revived franchise, or if it’ll just be dreadful all on its own. Or—and this is actually possible—if it can be a genuinely good movie that’s back for a reason!
I’m intrigued by who’s making it, and sadly that doesn’t include Wong or Morgan. But it’s co-directed by Zach Lipovsky, whose track record is, well, it’s improving! He was behind 2014’s Leprechaun: Origins, which has the ignominious achievement of holding a 0 percent score on Rotten Tomatoes, but then found more success with 2018’s Freaks where he partnered up with Adam Stein who co-directs here, and with whom he earned well-deserved acclaim for directorial work on the 2022 revival of Fraggle Rock! So, honestly, who knows there.
Writing comes courtesy of recent Scream franchise penner Guy Busick and Jon Watts…yes, that Jon Watts, the director of the last three Spider-Man movies! Wow!
Bloodlines will also be the wonderful Tony Todd’s final film, after his death last year. He reprises his character, William Bludworth, who appeared in four of the previous films in the series, giving this revival an extra sense of validity in my mind.
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