Often when a movie franchise goes more than a decade without any new offerings, it’s due to a pronounced decrease in popularity, if not a total lack of interest. That hasn’t entirely been the case for the Final Destination films, despite the 2011 sequel’s dip at the box office, but it still took around 14 years for the sixth installment, Final Destination: Bloodlines, to hit the big screen. The wait was worth it, though, as the sequel totally won over critics and easily earned the franchise’s biggest opening weekend box office.
We loved Final Destination: Bloodlines here at CinemaBlend, as our review proves in full, and when franchise producer and OG co-screenwriter Glen Morgan sat with our own Eric Eisenberg to talk about the hyper-lethal sequel, he explained why this wasn’t a case where only one factor was to blame for the long hiatus between films. As seen in the video below, he began by saying:
These movies are very complicated. They're challenging both technically and creatively to make sure that everything kind of works. The plausible and credible is just enough, because remember, Final Destination lives in ‘That is like a one in a million shot.’ That 1% is where FD lives, and that's the thing that makes it work.
One way to gauge the legitimacy of Glen Morgan's statement there is to think about how few movies are altogether like Final Destination, especially in the horror genre, where copycats are plentiful. Sure, there are other movies that hinge on characters trying to avoid doomed fates, but it's the inventive Rube Goldberg-esque death sequences and unpredictable massacres that set the FD movies apart. Crafting a variety of situations that can still all feasibly connect back to one another isn’t the easiest task.
Of course, absence makes the heart grow both fonder and more creative, and so the lack of Final Destination sequels every two or three years allowed for a resurgence of death-thwarting ideas and gore-tastic kills. But just because one has the motivation to move forward doesn't always mean the rest of the world is aligned.
Glen Morgan continued, pointing to the first few years of the 2020s as an extended time when it was hard for Hollywood to get anything up and running with ease. In his words:
But Covid, actors strike, two years to get the script where it was. That's almost five and a half, six years right there. So we really didn't take as long as you think, the circumstances just sort of got in the way of making the movie come through. So we're just really glad to be here now.
Rather than feeling dejected and frustrated with all the life getting in the way of their clever on-screen deaths, everyone behind the scenes was able to dig in that much more to ensure that Bloodlines checked every conceivable box that fans would be most excited to see.
I think that the time that it took to get it done, we really learned a lot about what made the other movies work, some of the things that were perhaps more challenging, and we did our best to readdress that balance in Final Destination Bloodlines. And I think we were successful.
Of course, it also doesn't hurt that Spider-Man trilogy helmer Jon Watts joined the squad in 2022 to craft the story along with screenwriters Guy Busick and Lori Evans Taylor, to serve as a producer, and to hand-pick the two directors Zach Lipovsky and Adam Stein based on their wild and gory pitch. Watts' involvement would likely get a vast majority of horror sequels off the ground.
Would he have jumped into the creative process on a Final Destination movie if the franchise hadn't seemingly sat stagnent for a decade? Actually, I don't even want to know what that outcome would look like, so no prophetic visions, please!
Check out more of our Final Destination: Bloodlines footage below!
Considering just how much the creative team threw at the wall with this sequel, it's not likely another Final Destination follow-up will pop up amidst other upcoming horror movies, especially without recurring star Tony Todd around to return after his heartfelt appearance in the sixth film.
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