Let this be a lesson: Death never gives up.
New Line Cinema, now a subsidiary of WarnerMedia, is attempting to cheat death one more time and bringing back the Final Destination franchise. Patrick Melton and Marcus Dunstan, writers of four of the Saw movies, will pen the script. The Hollywood Reporter first reported the news.
The first Final Destination film debuted back in 2000 and told the story of a group of high school students who elect not to board a plane to Paris after one of them has a premonition the plane will explode mid-air and kill everyone aboard. The plane does explode. Unfortunately, Death having been cheated out of securing some souls does whatever it can to kill the remaining would-be plane explosion victims.
The original film was very successful, taking in $112 million on a $23 million budget. That James Wong-directed movie spawned a very successful franchise featuring four more films in which characters would be killed in increasingly creative and ridiculous ways. The most recent Final Destination film, Final Destination 5, debuted in 2011. The franchise even spun off into a series of novels and comic books as well.
The announced film will be the sixth in the series but it will not be sequel nor feature any characters from the original films (most of whom are dead anyway). According to The Hollywood Reporter, it’s being billed as a “re-imagining.” The Final Destination premise is so easily applied to any storytelling formula that this is one of those instances that a “re-imagining” sounds perfectly valid.
The writers, Melton and Dunstan, were the winners of Project Greenlight season 3 and wrote Saw installments IV, V, VI, and 3D. They also wrote the script for the upcoming children’s horror book adaptation Scary Stories To Tell in the Dark.
It’s no wonder that Warner Bros. wants to bring Final Destination back. Horror has always been a pretty easy avenue for profits and that’s as apparent now as ever. Movies like Get Out and Bird Box have generated enormous profits and attention for their respective studios on very small budgets. WarnerMedia should be as aware of this as anyone, having produced the enormously successful Conjuring series and Stephen King adaptation It.