If there’s anything you can depend on when it comes to Hollywood it’s canceling your favorite shows, queerbaiting, and giving us another sequel to a movie franchise that we just wish would die just like its characters. That franchise happens to be Final Destination. According to The Hollywood Reporter, the cast has been rounded out and we have an expected release date of 2025. Personally, they’re not going to get me by casting someone from Julie and the Phantoms, a show that I loved but was canceled, and Brec Bassinger from Stargirl. Love the young talent, hate the overall concept.
The first Final Destination was released in 2000. It told the story of a young man named Alex, played by Devon Sawa, who had a premonition about a plane crash during a school trip. He and a couple of others get off the plane and are spared a fiery fate. But it becomes abundantly clear that death is still looking for them as they start dropping one by one. This cycle continues into the sequel. Except there is a new lead and Ali Larter from the first movie gets killed off. But that didn’t stop Hollywood as they kept going with the third movie in the franchise starring Mary Elizabeth Winstead. Now I personally don’t like sequels but the third one has a special place in my heart for how out of pocket it was, especially with those tanning beds.
It’s during the fourth movie in this franchise that I personally feel like it lost its spark and just became a cash grab. The deaths were just gratuitous and not creative at all. And I didn’t like anybody on that cast, making it easy for me to cheer for death to win. As for the fifth one, I didn’t even know there was a fifth one until I started writing this. I love horror so I don’t know how I miss this but from what I’m seeing from the cover art and the trailer, I’m glad I missed it. It looks like it went straight to VOD to never be heard from again. And if someone who loves the movies doesn’t even know there’s a fifth one in the franchise and they’re going for a sixth one, you’re running out of steam and should just park this thing.
We don’t need a sixth sequel, especially, because I can already predict what’s going to happen in this movie. According to IMDb, Bloodlines is about a group of first responders who escape death’s grasp. And as predicted in all of the movies they start to be killed in increasingly unlikely and weird ways. But it’s the title that I feel gives everything away. Because you don’t pick something like that unless you’re going to go back and tie it to the first one in some way. It’s going to be some cookey idea about how there’s unfinished business and somehow the previous movie’s lead was never supposed to live and is the child of someone from the first movie or one of its sequels. It’s unimaginative and kind of reminds me of the unused idea to give Larter’s character a baby before she was axed because of scheduling conflicts.
Horror is pretty predictable. And I will say that sometimes I like the predictability of said horror movies. But Final Destination doesn’t have the same flavor it used to and every sequel just dilutes it. I remember watching the first one and being terrified to fly afterward. It was such a simple concept back then too. It felt fresh and new. And let’s not forget the second movie which terrified a whole generation from driving behind a truck with logs on it. I feel like none of the other movies recreated that magic or fear. And I don’t think Hollywood is in the business of creating magic in horror anymore. For Hollywood, horror is a cash grab. For smaller creators like the people who do the Winnie the Pooh horror slashers, get your money. But for big Hollywood? I don’t trust them to create fun horror that touches on the smallest and most delicate fears that anyone can relate to. Instead, I expect them to release something that goes straight to video on demand, to be forgotten forever like the 5th installment of this franchise.
Final Destination: Bloodlines is set to release in 2025.
