'Final Destination' Reboot Coming From 'Saw' Franchise Writers
Keep a close eye on your Rube Goldberg machines, watch your back around sharp objects, and avoid roller coasters at all costs: a Final Destination reboot is coming to kill us all. OK, maybe not us, but just like the existing movies, Death will certainly be out to kill this film's characters in creative and ludicrous ways. Learn more about the reboot below.
The Hollywood Reporter says Patrick Melton and Marcus Dunstan will be handling the script for the Final Destination reboot, making the jump from a different long-running horror franchise that was running around the same time. Melton and Dunstan wrote four Saw movies, and their horror credits don't stop there: they also wrote the Feast movies, Piranha 3DD, and the upcoming Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark. But it's really their work with several of the Saw sequels – movies which shared some DNA with Final Destination in finding increasingly elaborate ways for people to die – that makes them a seemingly perfect fit to bring this franchise back from the dead.
If you weren't paying attention to the horror movie scene in the 2000s, the Final Destination movies (which began in 2000 and wrapped up in 2011) are all about small groups of good-looking people who manage to avoid dying in a catastrophic accident. But Death doesn't like being circumvented, so it basically turns into the most terrifying serial killer ever, hunting the survivors down one by one and killing them off in ridiculous ways. Highlights include: death by statue, death by nail gun, death by tanning bed, death by pool vacuum, and so many more.
This reboot will be the sixth Final Destination movie, and THR says it's being referred to as "a re-imagining" of the franchise. No plot details have been revealed, so the extent of the re-imagining is unclear. Personally, I'm hoping they cast an actor to play Death this time, and he or she just pops out after every kill with a cheesy pun that relates to how a character just died. At this point, they might as well just take it completely off the rails. (Cue train crash sequence that kills half of the characters.)
There's no word yet about who might direct or star, but the casts of these films have contained promising young talents (Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Mykelti Williamson, Amanda Crew) and completely forgettable actors alike. I feel like there's the danger of New Line looking at this as a somewhat disposable, low budget movie that they decide to cast a YouTube star in the lead, but I'll be praying to the specter of Death that that doesn't happen.