The group realizes they’ve somehow cheated “death’s design” – but not for long, as the survivors get picked off one by one in increasingly complex death sequences. A stereotypical all-American teenage protagonist has a premonition of a disaster, usually involving a large-scale mechanical or infrastructural malfunction, and manages to escape with a group of bystanders only to watch, helplessly, as the disaster occurs and kills many others. The standard Final Destination plot is repeated like a 12-bar blues pattern, with some variations. In the Final Destination universe, there’s no Freddy Krueger, Jason Voorhees, or Ghostface – instead, the teen-murdering Big Bad is Death itself. Over a ten-year period and five films (with a reboot on the way), the franchise raked in over $650 million at the box office for New Line Cinema, with a total kill count of 496 pretty decent numbers for a series lacking a corporeal villain. Nowhere is this more evident than in the Final Destination series, which celebrated its 20th anniversary in 2020. For most successful horror film franchises, the river to box-office gold runs crimson with the blood of gleefully slaughtered teens.
