All 6 Final Destination movies ranked — the 25-year-old original has its first real challenger
It took the Final Destination franchise 25 years and five sequels to make a movie critics liked more than the original.
The series began in 2000 with an idea from Jeffrey Reddick and has followed the same rules ever since: someone has a premonition of a disaster, a handful of people escape it, and Death comes back for them one by one, usually through a chain of household accidents. Tony Todd played William Bludworth, the mortician who explains those rules, in most of the films. Six films are out, and a seventh is scheduled for May 12, 2028.
6. The Final Destination (2009)
The fourth film turned the series into a 3D showcase and built everything around objects flying at the audience. The premonition is a crash at a speedway that brings the grandstand down. Critics gave it 28% on Rotten Tomatoes, the franchise's lowest, and opening-night audiences gave it a C CinemaScore, also the lowest.
It made $187.4 million worldwide on a $40 million budget, the most of any film in the series at the time. That's the only category it wins.
5. Final Destination 3 (2006)
James Wong, who directed the original, came back for the third film and opened it on a roller coaster, the Devil's Flight, coming off its track. Mary Elizabeth Winstead plays the student who sees it coming. Her photographs from that night end up hinting at how each survivor will die, which gives the film a gimmick the others don't have.
It's a competent repeat of the formula, and its reviews say so: 44% on Rotten Tomatoes. It still made $118.9 million, more than the original.
4. Final Destination 2 (2003)
The sequel has the most famous scene in the franchise, and it's the first one. A logging truck on Route 23 sheds its load, and the pile-up that follows gave a generation of drivers a reason to change lanes. David R. Ellis directed it, and Ali Larter returned as Clear Rivers, the only survivor of the first film still alive.
After that opening, the film never quite matches itself. It holds 52% on Rotten Tomatoes and earned a B+ CinemaScore, but it made the least money of the six: $90.9 million worldwide.
3. Final Destination 5 (2011)
The fifth film opens with the North Bay Bridge collapsing under a busload of coworkers, and for 14 years it was the franchise's best-reviewed entry, at 64% on Rotten Tomatoes. Steven Quale directed it after working as a second unit director on Avatar.
It also has the series' best ending. In the final minutes, the survivors board a plane, and it turns out to be Flight 180. The whole film is a prequel to the first one, and it lands exactly where the franchise began.
2. Final Destination Bloodlines (2025)
Bloodlines is the challenger. It goes back to 1969, to a premonition of the Sky View restaurant tower collapsing, and carries it into the present: a college student keeps dreaming the disaster her grandmother survived, and Death is now working through everyone descended from the people who should have died. Zach Lipovsky and Adam Stein directed it from a script by Guy Busick and Lori Evans Taylor.
Don't miss: How old is Jason in Crystal Lake? Peacock shaved more than a decade off the Friday the 13th timeline
Its numbers aren't close to the rest of the series:
- 92% on Rotten Tomatoes and 73 on Metacritic, the franchise's best on both.
- $317.9 million worldwide, about $130 million more than any earlier entry.
- A $50 million budget, also the series' biggest.
It was also Tony Todd's last film. He was seriously ill during the shoot and died in November 2024, six months before it opened. The directors cut some of his scripted lines and let him talk to the audience directly.
"Life is precious. Enjoy every single second," Bludworth says in his final scene.
1. Final Destination (2000)
The original keeps the top spot because everything in the other five comes from it. Reddick first wrote the story as a spec script for The X-Files, never submitted, after reading about a woman whose mother had a bad feeling about her flight home. James Wong and Glen Morgan, who had both written for The X-Files, reworked it into the feature.
Devon Sawa plays the student who sees Flight 180 explode on takeoff and gets himself and six others thrown off the plane. Everything the series still runs on starts here: the premonition, the list of survivors, Bludworth and deaths that start with a leak in a bathroom. Critics weren't sold at the time, and the film holds 50% on Rotten Tomatoes, but it made $112.9 million on a $23 million budget and started a franchise.
The seventh film is set for May 12, 2028, directed by Michiel Blanchart and written by Lori Evans Taylor, who co-wrote Bloodlines.
Previously we wrote: Clayface is flopping overseas before reviews are even out. The US is its last chance