Final Destination Could Be Resurrected
Did you know the Final Destination series got its start as a rejected pitch for an X-Files episode? How cool would it have been to see Mulder and Scully try to outwit Death itself? But that never happened, and instead New Line Cinema bought the pitch in movie form.
There are five Final Destination films in existence, all with the same threadbare plot: there’s this group of young whippersnappers. One of them has a prophetic dream warning them of an impending disaster that will kill them all. Because of the dream, they avoid the disaster….but the Grim Reaper is so mad, he decides their deaths now have to be ten times as ridiculous and over-the-top as they would have been.
So each individual member of that group unwittingly enters a room full of deadly traps and objects, naively positions themselves in the path of danger, and a crazy Rube Goldberg chain reaction lacerates them in inventive and insane ways until they bite it. There’s a fright factor in having Death itself pursue you, but the franchise ceased to be scary a long time ago.
There hasn’t been a new Final Destination since 2011, but for lack of fresh ideas, New Line is willing to revive the series once again. According to THR they’ve tapped Patrick Melton and Marcus Dunstan to write the script, which doesn’t fill us with confidence. They have a lengthy horror resume, but not a great one. They wrote four of the Saw movies and something called Piranha 3DD that you probably don’t remember but can visualize based on its title alone.
For now, Final Destination seems to have avoided Death’s grip, but New Line can’t stop the inevitable.