SPOILER WARNING: The following article contains massive spoilers for Final Destination: Bloodlines. If you have not yet seen the film, proceed at your own risk!
Like all of the other chapters in the franchise, Final Destination: Bloodlines doesn't have a happy ending; it ends in blood and carnage. For a brief time, it seems like protagonists Stefani Reyes (Kaitlyn Santa Juana) and her brother Charlie (Teo Briones) have survived the complex machinations of death... but then a train gets derailed in their neighborhood and they end up getting crushed. It's a horrific conclusion, but what's important is that it's a fun one – and that wasn't always the case when different drafts of the script were in development.
The critically-acclaimed Final Destination: Bloodlines is still playing in theaters around the country, but directors Zach Lipovski and Adam Stein spoke with ScreenRant as their film prepares to make its full shift to the home video market, and they explained that an early version of the movie had a very bleak ending that was considered before getting altered. Said Setein,
Yeah. I mean, the script went through so many different versions, and we explored every different possibility. I think one of the early drafts of the script ended with Stefani making it inside the cabin and basically ended with her—that she's going to live the rest of her life in the cabin to protect Charlie. And it sort of had this depressing feeling in the end.
In a franchise where the audience is meant to both chuckle and scream when characters meet grim fates, a "depressing feeling" is not the note that a Final Destination should end on. The new movie does a lot of cool things to change up the formula of the canon, but it's definitely for the best that this idea wasn't further pursued.
The idea, according to Adam Stein, was that Stefani would see her life become similar to her grandmother's (who lived a life of solitude and safety in order to best protect her family), and it just didn't feel right. He continued,
It was like, 'Oh, okay, I get it. She's the new Iris. She's going to live her whole life in the cabin to protect her little brother.' And it kind of emotionally made sense, but not in terms of the movie-going experience. It kind of ended on a sad, melancholy note, which just didn't feel right for Final Destination.
Zach Lipovski and Adam Stein in collaboration with screenwriters Guy Busick and Lori Evans Taylor knew that they had to find something else for the finale of Final Destination: Bloodlines, and they had a very clear idea of what they were looking for in terms of tone:
You kind of want people to leave with a spring in their step and a smile on their face. And so we went through lots of different versions with the key thing being unpredictability. How do you make people think they know what's going to happen and then twist it, while also leaving them with a smile on their face when they leave the theater? So it's a lot of tricky things to balance there. But yeah, we've definitely explored lots of possibilities
The end of Final Destination: Bloodlines is a successful conclusion to that whole process. Stefani briefly thinks that she is safe because she drowned a la A. J. Cook's Kimberly Corman in Final Destination 2, but because she was never clinically dead, Death still sees her as fair game.
Final Destination: Bloodlines is among my favorite big screen experiences of 2025 thus far, and I'm stoked to revisit the horror sequel as it makes its way fully into the home video market. The movie is currently available for digital purchase and rental from all major online outlets, and if you're a physical media fan, you can pre-order the film on 4K UHD, Blu-ray and or DVD prior to its release on July 22.
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