Final Destination is a 2000 American supernatural horror film directed by James Wong (in his directorial debut), who co-wrote the screenplay with Glen Morgan and Jeffrey Reddick, based on a story by Reddick. It stars Devon Sawa, Ali Larter, Kerr Smith, and Tony Todd. Sawa portrays a teenager who cheats death after having a premonition of a catastrophic plane explosion. He and several of his classmates leave the plane before the explosion occurs, but Death later takes the lives of those who were meant to die on the plane.
The film began as a spec script written by Reddick for an episode of The X-Files in order for Reddick to get a TV agent. A colleague at New Line Cinema persuaded Reddick to write it as a feature-length film. Later, Wong and Morgan, The X-Files writing partners, became interested in the script and agreed to work on the film. Principal photography took place in New York City and Vancouver, with additional scenes filmed in Toronto and San Francisco.
Final Destination was released in the United States on March 17, 2000. The film achieved commercial success, earning $112.9 million against a $23 million budget. While it received mixed reviews from critics, it won the Saturn Award for Best Horror Film and Best Performance by a Younger Actor for Sawa, The film's popularity led to the expansion of the Final Destination franchise, which includes five additional films, as well as novels and comic books. The first sequel, Final Destination 2, was released on January 31, 2003.
Plot High school student Alex Browning boards Volée Airlines Flight 180, a Boeing 747-200B, with his classmates for their senior trip to Paris from John F. Kennedy Airport. Before take-off, Alex has a premonition that the plane will explode in mid-air, killing everybody on board. When the events from his vision begin to occur in reality, he panics until a fight breaks out between him and student Carter Horton, resulting in both of them being removed from the plane, along with Alex's best friend Tod Waggner, Carter's girlfriend Terry Chaney, teacher Valerie Lewton, and students Billy Hitchcock and Clear Rivers. None of them except Clear believe Alex about his vision until the plane explodes shortly after take-off. Afterwards, the survivors are interrogated by two FBI agents, Weine and Schreck, who are both suspicious of Alex.
After a memorial service, Tod slips on a puddle of water from the toilet and falls into the bathtub while a clothes line wraps around his neck, strangling him to death. While his death is ruled a suicide, Alex sneaks into the funeral home to examine Tod's corpse, where mortician William Bludworth reveals that the survivors who cheated death have disrupted Death's plan and that Death is now claiming the lives of those who were meant to die in the accident. Alex and Clear meet the other survivors at a café, where a heated argument breaks out over what is happening. A frustrated Terry leaves and is suddenly run over by a speeding bus as she steps into the street.
After watching a news report on the cause of the explosion, Alex concludes that Death is reclaiming the survivors in the order they would have died in the disaster. Nonetheless, he is too late to save Ms. Lewton, who is mortally wounded in a chain-reaction accident in her kitchen before a fire causes her house to explode. The remaining survivors reunite while driving through town as Alex explains the situation. Still skeptical of Alex's theory, Carter stops his car at a train crossing to prove it wrong. Alex, Clear, and Billy manage to escape, but Carter, realizing his impending fate, is still trapped in his car. Alex manages to save him just before the car is smashed by an oncoming train that knocks a piece of shrapnel from the wreckage into the air, decapitating Billy. Alex deduces that because he intervened in Carter's death, it skipped to the next person in the sequence.
While hiding in a secluded cabin the next day, Alex realizes that because he changed seats with two classmates before take-off, he had miscalculated the original death sequence, making Clear the next intended victim. He rushes to her house to save her while Weine and Schreck pursue him. Alex finds Clear trapped inside her car, surrounded by loose electrical cables that ignite a gasoline leak around her. He grabs the cable, allowing her to escape the car just before it explodes.
Six months later, Alex travels to Paris with Clear and Carter to celebrate their survival. While discussing their ordeal, Alex realizes that by saving Clear from the car explosion, he caused Death to skip her and move on to him as the next in line. Fearing their struggle is unfinished, Alex retreats when a bus collision hurls a parking sign towards a neon sign that begins falling towards him. Carter pushes Alex out of the way at the last second, but the sign swings back toward him, implying his death as the film abruptly cuts to the end credits.
Cast
Several film characters are named after famous horror film directors, actors, and producers: Billy Hitchcock is named after Alfred Hitchcock, the Browning family and Tod Waggner are named after Tod Browning, Larry Murnau is a reference to Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau, Blake Dreyer to Carl Theodor Dreyer, Valerie Lewton to Val Lewton, Agent Schreck to Max Schreck, Terry Chaney to Lon Chaney, Christa Marsh recalls Fredric March, Agent Weine of Robert Wiene and Todd and George Waggner are directly named after Universal Horror film producer George Waggner.
Production Development The original idea was written by Jeffrey Reddick as a spec script for The X-Files in order to get a TV agent. "I was actually flying home to Kentucky and I read a story about a woman who was on vacation and her mom called her and said, 'Don't take the flight tomorrow, I have a really bad feeling about it.' She switched flights and the plane that she would have been on crashed", said Reddick. "I thought, that's creepy—what if she was supposed to die on that flight?" Building on his idea, Reddick wrote a script and got an agent, but instead of submitting the script to The X-Files, he acted on the suggestion of a colleague at New Line Cinema to write it as a feature film.
New Line Cinema bought Reddick's treatment and hired him to write the original draft of the script, which featured Death as an unseen force. The survivors were originally adults, but New Line made Reddick change them to teenagers after the success of Scream. After the script was finished, New Line Cinema submitted the script to directors, including writing partners James Wong and Glen Morgan. Both writers were willing to make it into a film, although they rewrote the script to comply with their standards. "I believe that at one time or another we've all experienced a sense of prescience. We have a hunch, a feeling, and then that hunch proves true", Wong said. "We want to do for planes and air travel what Jaws did for sharks and swimming". Expanding on his decision to write and direct the film, Wong stated: One thing we were all in agreement on from the start is that we didn't want to do a slasher movie. [...] I became very excited when we decided to make the world at large, in the service of death, our antagonist. Everyday objects and occurrences then take on ominous proportions and it becomes less about whether or not our characters are going to die and more about how they will die and how they can delay their deaths. The entertainment value is in the "ride" not in the outcome, and by placing the premise of the film on the inevitability of death, we play a certain philosophical note.
Morgan said: The main thing they wanted about Death coming to get people is that you never saw a kind of a Michael Myers figure. You never saw a killer. And they liked that idea and they said, "Okay. Go write it." Once we had a basic story, I started cataloging the strange coincidences in my own life. For example, I was in the Vancouver airport waiting for a flight when John Denver came on over the loudspeaker. I remember saying to myself, "Hey, he just died in a plane crashthat's a little weird." We wrote that version of that experience into the script.
Producers Craig Perry and Warren Zide from Zide/Perry Productions helped with the film's budget because both were similarly fascinated by the idea of an invisible force executing its victims. Perry, a fan of The X-Files, claimed that he "responded to Wong and Morgan's work for one specific reason: dread". Years later, however, Reddick admitted that not giving the franchise a physical antagonist was regrettable, stating, "now every Halloween I go, 'We blew it!' There's no costume to buy, there's no action figure." New Line Cinema accepted financing and distributing rights for the film after Reddick came to them personally.
Casting
"One of the most important things we were looking for in casting was the actors' ability to play the subtleties – the little things that a character doesn't say or do that create the edge, the things that get under your skin and spook you", Morgan said about the auditions. Reddick originally envisioned Tobey Maguire and Kirsten Dunst for the lead roles of Alex Browning and Clear Rivers. Craig Perry envisioned Jessica Biel for the role of Clear.
Alex Browning, the last role cast, went to Canadian actor Devon Sawa, who previously starred in the 1999 film Idle Hands. Sawa said that when he read the script on a plane, he found himself peeking out the window at the engine every couple of minutes. Then he went down and met Morgan and Wong, and he thought "they were amazing and already had some great ideas". However, Morgan and Wong were undecided about casting him for the part, so they requested him to perform again as they reviewed his previous works. Morgan was astounded by Sawa's performance in Idle Hands, and Sawa was hired. Of the script, Sawa said, "There's not a lot of good stuff[...] for my age. You get a lot of scripts and all but they're teen ensembles and they're just crap. And then I got Flight 180[...] it's just awesome."
Sawa described his role as "in the beginning, [Alex] was kinda loopy and cotter, and you know, probably not the most popular guy in school. I think he might have been a dork, you know, doing their stuff and they had their own thing going and they're after the two beautiful girls in school, but there's no chance of that happening. I guess after the plane goes down, his world completely changes". "Devon has an everyman quality that makes him accessible", Wong said. "He doesn't appear as if he's supremely self-assured. He's more of a regular kid who can take on the complexities of the role and become a hero". Perry was amazed by Sawa's vulnerability in acting, describing him as "a very distinctive actor. He's very loose and he's kind of a cut-up when he's not on camera, but the moment the camera's on, I'd never seen anybody to completely slide right through the moment."
Ali Larter, who starred in the 1999 film Varsity Blues, was cast as female lead Clear Rivers. "The film shows how easy it is to turn on someone, to blame someone when you're scared", Larter said. "It's also about trusting your intuitions and yourself". She defined her part as "that girl who has a lot of loss in her life and has fallen for herself and had made a life within that. She's an artist, she lives by herself, and she's kinda holding to her grip for what the world has given her".
Seann William Scott, famous for portraying Steve Stifler in the 1999 film American Pie, was hired as class clown Billy Hitchcock. Scott admired the film and felt that "it's [as] dark and eerie as any Twilight Zone". He laughed at his role, saying that "[he] is lacking some social skills, he doesn't have quite a few friends, and he's like the tag-along." Scott was surprised when in the script his character was written as fat. The writers eventually changed it for Scott.