For 25 years now, the Final Destination franchise has been leaving us stressed and anxious about the twisted way death can reach us, especially those who somehow escaped some kind of catastrophic incident thanks to one of the franchise’s famously mysterious psychic visions. The 14-year gap between sequels ended up being worth the wait, though, as our 4.5 stars Final Destination: Bloodlines review can attest. Now that we’ve seen it, it’s about time we talk about Tony Todd’s legacy in the franchise.
Todd unfortunately died at the age of 69 back in November 2024 due to stomach cancer, but in the months before his death, he was able to join the cast of Final Destination: Bloodlines to film his fifth appearance in the franchise, reprising the role of William Bludworth. He gets an emotional sendoff in Bloodlines that perfectly wraps up his arc in the series. Let’s get into the story behind Tony Todd’s role in the Final Destination movies. SPOILERS are ahead.
Tony Todd Is The Only Actor Who Appeared In 5 Of 6 Final Destination Movies
The Final Destination movies started in 2000 with James Wong’s flagship feature, which Jeffrey Reddick first pitched as a spec script for The X-Files before taking it to New Line Cinema as a feature film. While the movie revolves around a group of teenagers who escape death after one of them sees a vision of the plane crashing, Candyman icon Tony Todd appeared for the first time in the small role of a mortician named William Bludworth.
Producer Craig Perry recently talked to Today about how the creative team landed Tony Todd to play the character:
We wanted somebody who always looked like he had a secret that he wasn’t telling, a sort of enigma behind his eyes.
Tony Todd is only in one scene of the original, but he makes quite an impression in those few minutes, not only on audiences, but by explaining the rules of the movie. If you escape or cheat Death, it will come back to claim back those lives that were supposed to be lost. Todd’s role helps inform the logic that sparked another five movies, so it was important to have someone unforgettably daunting saying those words. As Perry also said:
We really felt that Tony had all of that gravitas and mystery in his very DNA. His presence brought a sense of foreboding medicine mystery, and beyond that, he was able to have a playfulness that made the character fun to watch.
After that impressionable scene, Todd’s Bludworth would become the most recurring character in the horror series. He returned for the second 2003 movie, where Ali Larter’s Clear from the OG film visits him to get some additional help about cheating death, and later apepared in the third, fifth, and sixth installments.
His Cameo In Final Destination 3 Inspired Theories Saying He Was Death Himself
Tony Todd’s third appearance in a Final Destination movie, via 2006’s Final Destination 3, is unconventional because he doesn’t play Bludworth that time, but the voice of an animatronic Satan in a theme park early in the movie. Having Todd back in a different role has definitely had fans of the franchise talking about his origins over the years, and many crafting a theory that he might be playing Death himself. Someone on Reddit a decade ago posed the theory because “he’s at pretty much at all of the funerals” and “knows all of Death’s methods” along with his name sounding a lot like Blood-worth.
Others in the thread also thought he might be a Reaper because he’s “very unrealistic as a person” and Another fan suggested that because he never interacts with “anyone other than those who are marked for death” he might not even be a mortician to begin with! While none of these answers turned out to be the case, part of what made the movies so good was the intrigue around his character across the franchise.
His Final Appearance In Bloodlines Finally Explains His Origins
That brings us to Todd’s fifth and final appearance in Final Destination through Bloodlines. When co-director Zach Lipovsky spoke to Polygon about including Todd in the new movie, he said this:
Knowing this would probably be his last Final Destination movie, we wanted to flesh him out, give some answers as to why he’s been such an interesting character in the other films, and then also give him the ability to have an ending, and say goodbye to the character and goodbye to the audience.
Bloodlines does so by introducing audiences to a 1968 incident at the Skyview Restaurant Tower, where a character named Iris sees a vision about the immensity of its destruction before Iris and a young William make it out alive. All along Bludworth wasn’t Death or simply a creepy mortician, he had lived experience from cheating death himself. As Stein told USA Today:
He probably was gathering intelligence.
Now that puts a whole new perspective on the character after all these years. Bludworth’s story was able to be told in Bloodlines cleverly with its storyline that follows the granddaughter of Iris, who starts getting nightmares about the Skyview incident and seeks answers from an older Iris, who shares that while she was able to cheat Death, it fought back by killing other survivors and their descendants.
The Emotional Final Performance Also Came Straight From Tony Todd’s Heart
The filmmakers of Bloodlines have shared that even though Todd was sick at the time of the making of the Final Destination movie, he was “incredibly excited to participate” and asked them not to “write me out” due to his condition. While he was “physically weak” as he filmed his sequence, Stein shared that they asked if could put aside the script and speak from the heart.
We asked him, ‘Hey, Tony, what is all this Final Destination death stuff? What do you want to leave the fans with, if you had to say it in your own words?’ And the take that’s in the movie is really him speaking from the heart directly to the fans about what he thinks life and death are all about. I think that’s why it’s so emotionally powerful, because it’s really him.
When the storyline of Bloodlines leads Iris’s daughter Darlene to Bludworth, he reveals he’s sick and is retiring from his profession to enjoy what time he has left before offering more valuable Death advice. Stein also said this about his last lines in the franchise:
That final couple of lines he says are just him. The script ended with ‘I’m retiring, and I’m going to go enjoy the time I have left,’ and that’s it. But he brings it to the next level with what he says at that door, which is basically, ‘All life is precious. Enjoy the time you have left. Enjoy every single second, because you never know when.’
No wonder people are calling Bloodlines the best of the franchise, and critics collectively gave it the highest Rotten Tomatoes of any other movie! It finally gives Tony Todd a deep character arc and ties up a loose end audiences have been curious about for two decades.
And, it’s even more powerful and emotional knowing Tony Todd had such a hand in making it possible at the end of his life. The horror icon was given a place to finish off his legacy with Final Destination on his terms and with his own wisdom, and it's especially poetic for this franchise and its ongoing messages about death. Todd's Bludworth went out without fear, and that's chillingly beautiful.
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