On this day 25 years ago, an unsuspecting group of high school students got on a plane expecting to take a class trip to Paris. What they got instead was a date with death. Today, we celebrate the anniversary of Final Destination, one of the most important and influential mainstream horror movies of the early 2000s.
At the turn of the millennium, just about everything was looking for a new identity. From fashion to music, every corner of pop culture was looking to adapt to what felt like radically changing times. In the realm of horror, even things that had been popular were ending. Wes Craven’s Scream 3 came out in early 2000, to help bring the Ghostface saga to a close – for a while anyway. So even the slasher revival needed a facelift.
So, what was genre filmmaking going to look like in the year 2000 and beyond? Director James Wong helped to answer that question with his inventive, deadly movie. Working from a story by Jeffrey Reddick with backing from the folks at New Line Cinema, Final Destination helped give horror an identity for a new millennium. It also featured a memorable performance from the late legend Tony Todd, who was one of the consistent figures casting a shadow over the franchise as other casts rolled in.
The film as we know it centers on Alex Browning (Devon Sawa), who is embarking on a class trip to Paris. During a dream, he sees the plane explode moments after leaving the ground. Alex panics and gets a handful of his classmates and teachers to leave the plane. They watch in horror as Alex’s premonition comes true. The survivors have seemingly cheated death but, as they soon discover, it’s not so simple as all of that. One by one, they find out that fate is more than a little difficult to shake.
More than two decades later, the film is very much of its time, wearing its late ‘90s vibe on its sleeve. At the same time, it’s also still effective, with plenty of twists and turns, not to mention memorable kills, that still hit hard. It was also a hit with audiences, with Final Destination becoming a bonafide hit. Hitting theaters on March 17, 2000, the film earned a very impressive $113 million worldwide on a reasonable $23 million budget.
Naturally, in the realm of Hollywood filmmaking that meant sequel time. It hardly mattered that the first movie wasn’t exactly a critical darling. Final Destination 2 hit theaters in 2003 and remains a fan favorite to this day. The opening kill sequence on the freeway instantly etched its way into the annals of horror movie history. Though it remains the lowest-grossing entry of the series overall, $90 million worldwide in the era of DVD was more than enough to keep the franchise going.
To date, we’ve had five films, culminating in 2011’s very clever Final Destination 5, which ties things back to the original with a pretty clever twist ending. Sure, there were low points, namely 2009’s The Final Destination, though that was also the highest-grossing of the series. The main point is, this was our first big new horror franchise in the new millennium, which is a big deal. Five movies. Nearly $700 million worldwide. This has become a pillar of horror.
To that end, Warner Bros. is getting ready to revive the series later this year with Final Destination: Bloodlines. Can this be like 2018’s Halloween and bring back the Grim Reaper for another string of sequels for a new generation? We shall see. If nothing else, it’s a testament to the franchise’s legacy, which all began 25 years ago with a clever studio genre picture that broke out and became a major success.
For more, check out some goods from Fango’s archives on Final Destination including…
