How many ‘Final Destination’ movies are there?
In the early ’90s, New Line Cinema employee and aspiring screenwriter Jeffrey Reddick had a bright idea that he believed would help him land a TV agent. At that time, any writer who wanted to work in TV had to write a spec script for a show already on the air and send it to the producers. Reddick had devised a story idea he knew had legs, and he felt it was a perfect fit for an episode of a popular supernatural mystery show. Little did he know, though, that he’d actually created the basis of Final Destination, an enduring Hollywood horror franchise with a new entry releasing in 2025.
“I was a huge fan of The X-Files,” Kentucky native Reddick told Den of Geek in 2021, “and thought about a scene where somebody has a premonition and gets off the plane, and then it crashes and used that as the plot.” In Reddick’s spec script version of his story, it would have been Dana Scully’s brother Charles who had the premonition. When he gets off the plane with a few other passengers, they all start dying in mysterious ways.
To make matters worse, “Charles blacks out every time there is a murder, so people suspect he is doing it.” The big twist in Reddick’s script was that the sheriff who has been investigating the case alongside Mulder and Scully is secretly Death’s agent. He had “been shot and flatlined at the same time as the plane crash,” and Death resurrected him “to kill off all the survivors, including Charles.”
Proud of his script, Reddick showed it to some pals at New Line, who all encouraged him not to send it to The X-Files – but not because it was bad. Instead, the studio felt it was strong enough to develop as a feature film idea. It eventually optioned his treatment and, in an ironic twist, the two writers brought in to do a final rewrite were James Wong and Glen Morgan, both known for working on The X-Files.
Wong didn’t just rewrite Final Destination, though. He also directed it, and under his guidance, the teen horror became a hit to the tune of $112million. Wong and Morgan’s innovation of death being an unseen force that kills people in bizarre ways that look like tragic accidents or suicides captured the public imagination – so much so that if someone has a near-miss moment to this day, chances are it will be pointed out that, “You just had a Final Destination moment.”
Four sequels were produced over the next 11 years before the franchise went into stasis following 2011’s Final Destination 5. However, it will soon be resurrected in 2025 with Final Destination: Bloodlines, the sixth entry in the series.
Reddick knows Final Destination will forever define his career. “It’s probably going to end up on my gravestone,” he chuckled. It’s such an ironic title.” To this day, when he flies worldwide and meets fans of the series he helped create, he’s likely reminded of where he was when he first came up with the idea—and its real-life inspiration.
So, was ‘Final Destination’ inspired by a true story?
Long before he had any intention of writing a potential X-Files script, Reddick was on a plane flying home from Los Angeles to Kentucky. He found himself reading a news story about a woman vacationing in Hawaii. She was due to fly home the next day but received an alarming phone call from her mum, who warned her, “Don’t take the flight tomorrow. I have a really bad feeling about it.”
Her mum’s hunch must have spooked the woman because she changed her flight. To her horror, she later found out that the plane she was initially supposed to be on had crashed. Reddick revealed, “I thought, ‘That’s creepy. What if she was supposed to die on that flight?'” The rest, as they say, is history.
