‘Final Destination’ producer Craig Perry says the fourth movie ‘sucks’ (exclusive)

Sometimes there’s no denying that a movie is bad.

That’s certainly the case for The Final Destination, the fourth film in the Final Destination franchise, which hit theaters back in 2009. Producer Craig Perry assumed that the film would be the final entry in the horror series, but he was relieved that didn’t turn out to be the case.

“I figured that we’re done,” he said, in an exclusive excerpt from Screaming and Conjuring: The Resurrection and Unstoppable Rise of the Modern Horror Movie. “Then, lo and behold, opening weekend, we’re like, ‘Uh, okay, here we go.’

Want more movie news? Sign up for Entertainment Weekly‘s free newsletter to get the latest trailers, celebrity interviews, film reviews, and more.

“I don’t think the fourth one is good at all, actually it sucks,” he added. “But it was successful enough to give us a chance to redeem ourselves with 5.”

When the original film was released in 2000, it was an integral part of the burgeoning modern horror craze. On May 16, the franchise launches its sixth film, Final Destination Bloodlines, the first new entry in the series in over a decade.

Clark Collis, a former Entertainment Weekly reporter, explores the history behind the Final Destination franchise, as well as numerous other modern horror franchises, including Scream, The Conjuring, and Paranormal Activity, in his new book, Screaming and Conjuring: The Resurrection and Unstoppable Rise of the Modern Horror Movie.

In the new book, Collis, who also wrote 2021’s You’ve Got Red on You: How Shaun of the Dead Was Brought to Life, traces the rise of the modern horror movie and its essential place in the film industry. The pop culture history hits shelves on Sept. 2, but fans can get an early sneak peek with the exclusive excerpt below. Read on for more.

Three years after the theatrical debut of Scream, and following the many copycat films which had followed in its wake, the public’s interest in seeing young characters being picked off by mysterious killers was starting to wane. But in the spring of 2000, Robert Shaye’s New Line Pictures proved that audiences could still be enticed to see a slasher film packed with teenagers as long as the villain was Death itself. Final Destination starred Devon Sawa as a New York high school student named Alex who receives a premonition that the Paris-bound plane he has just boarded will catch fire in the air. After Alex, some of his classmates, and a teacher disembark, the plane does indeed explode. During the days that follow, the survivors start passing away and Alex realizes they are being murdered by the Grim Reaper.

The story for Final Destination was conceived by a New Line employee named Jeffrey Reddick. “The original idea came from an article I read about a woman who was on vacation and her mother told her to switch flights because she had a bad feeling,” he says. “The woman switched planes and the plane she was scheduled to be on crashed. So that idea stuck with me.”

Black and queer, Reddick had a difficult childhood growing up in eastern Kentucky during the 1970s. “I was dealing with a lot of racism and homophobia,” he says. “I wasn’t out yet, but I was just hearing it all around me. There was so much stuff that I could have internalized and [that would have] made me a very rage-filled person. Horror let me let that fear out in a healthy way.”

Reddick adored Wes Craven’s original A Nightmare on Elm Street. “I saw it in a double feature at a drive-in with Alone in the Dark,” he says. “It just scared the hell out of me.” Reddick wrote down his idea for a prequel to Craven’s film and sent it to Robert Shaye at the New Line offices in New York. “I’m 14 years old in Kentucky. I have no idea how the film business works,” says Reddick. “He sends it back to me and he’s like, ‘We don’t take unsolicited material.’ I wrote him back, and I’m like, ‘Excuse me, sir, but I’ve seen three of your movies, so I think you can take five minutes to read my story.’ Only the young can be so ballsy. He read my treatment, he got back in touch with me, and I ended up staying pen pals with him and his assistant, Joy Mann, from age 14 to 19.”

Like Scream screenwriter Kevin Williamson, Reddick originally dreamed of becoming an actor. At the age of 19, he moved to New York and studied at The American Academy of Dramatic Arts. He also secured an internship at New Line, where he would be hired as an executive assistant on a permanent basis. Reddick wrote a spec script for an episode of TV show The X-Files inspired by the story he had read about the woman who switched planes. “My friends at New Line read the script and they were like, ‘You should develop this as a feature,’” he says. Reddick turned his script into the screenplay for a film he titled Flight 180, a supernatural slasher with a final boy instead of a final girl. “I wanted to flip the genre on its head,” he says. “I thought it would be interesting to have a male lead going through this.”

Reddick sent his treatment to Zide-Perry Productions, a new company founded in 1997 by producers Craig Perry and Warren Zide, who had met working in the New Line mailroom. The trio spent six months working on the concept, sending treatments to New Line and receiving notes from the company. In the initial pitch, the potential victims who got off the plane had no connection with each other and were older than the teenagers who would make up the main cast of characters in the finished film. Reddick was asked to lower their ages because of the success of Scream and the other recent teen slashers. “Obviously there were movies that were coming out that seemed to be catering to the demographic,” says Craig Perry. When New Line dragged its heels about buying the project, Zide and Perry threatened to sell it to Dimension instead. “They had to shit or get off the pot,” says Perry. Facing the prospect of losing the project to their rivals, New Line acquired Reddick’s screenplay.

The company initially liked the idea of author and Hellraiser filmmaker Clive Barker directing the film. “He was the first person that they [approached],” says Perry. “It just wasn’t his. Clive is his own sort of nation state, generating and executing material, so I was not surprised at all [when he passed].”

The company hired director James Wong and his writing partner Glen Morgan, both X-Files veterans. The pair pitched that Death would arrange for the killing of the survivors using familiar objects and scenarios in complex or unexpected ways. “They took the idea of ‘Let’s make Death an invisible force’ and [asked] ‘Then what would Death do?’” says Perry. “Death would come from a confluence of small things, not necessarily a big thing.”

As Zide and Perry were working on Final Destination, the pair were also developing the high school sex comedy American Pie, which Universal would successfully release in 1999. “Casting Final Destination was fascinating, because we were doing American Pie at the same time,” says Perry. “Every young actor in the world is coming through the casting offices. Tobey Maguire came through, for sure. I remember Topher Grace came through as well.”

Devon Sawa was cast as the male lead of Final Destination, and House on Haunted Hill actress Ali Larter was hired to play Alex’s classmate Clear. The supporting cast included Amanda Detmer, Dawson’s Creek star Kerr Smith, and Seann William Scott, who played the character Stifler in American Pie. “Seann couldn’t get a job because nobody knew who the fuck he was,” says Perry. “He was working in our office building. I’d be going to lunch, and he’d be outside after packing boxes, eating a sandwich. We’d given a VHS of American Pie early to New Line and they wanted to find a way for Seann to be in Final Destination.”

The film would find its connection to Clive Barker with the casting of Tony Todd as a mortician. The actor was best known for playing the killer in 1992’s Candyman, which was based on Barker’s short story “The Forbidden.” “We looked at every older Black actor,” says Perry, speaking before Todd’s death in 2024. “Ernie Hudson. Mykelti Williamson. But there’s something about Tony Todd. When he says something to you, outside of the little jet of piss that comes out [of you], you actually listen, because you are realizing: this is important. You can’t put a price tag on that.”

Director Wong shot the film in New York, San Francisco, Toronto, and Vancouver on a budget of $23 million. The production’s most elaborate sequence to shoot was Alex’s premonition, in which audiences would see the inside of the plane tear apart. “The plane scene was technically complicated, because you’ve got the chassis of a plane actually there on top of this 10,000-pound pig iron gimbal that is hydraulically operated by this joystick,” says Perry. “You would literally move the joystick like a fighter pilot, and the plane would pitch and yaw. It was just a very technically challenging, and physically challenging, sequence to do, but obviously it worked.”

New Line was determined to change the name of the film to something other than Flight 180. Perry explains that the company “was worried that it was going to come off like an airplane movie. Would you like to hear some of the alternate titles that were proposed? On Borrowed Time. Fear the Reaper. The Nth Degree. The Third Eye. In the Know. Coming to Get You. I don’t think it would have helped our cause if it was called any of those things.” Perry was happy when the studio settled on the title Final Destination. “We got lucky,” says the producer.

Devon Sawa recalls being “blown away” when he saw the finished film. “James Wong and Glen Morgan were geniuses,” says the actor. “There were so many things they were doing that they didn’t discuss. They had a vision.” New Line released Final Destination on March 17, 2000. The film grossed $10 million over its opening weekend and was still in the top ten six weeks later, ultimately earning $53 million in the US.

The film’s long run on cinema screens prompted New Line to proceed with a sequel. Jeffrey Reddick suggested that the second film open with a catastrophic highway accident caused by a logging truck whose cargo becomes unchained. Ali Larter and Tony Todd both returned for Final Destination 2. Devon Sawa did not come back, despite his character having survived the events of the original film. The actor was struggling with alcoholism and took a hiatus from acting in the mid-2000s. “Getting any movie made is challenging, and a lot of pressure is put on actors,” says Perry of Sawa’s absence from the film. “For a lot of reasons, it was probably best that he was not engaged in the second one. I’m glad that he is healthy, happy, has a family, and [is] doing the good work that he is doing.”

New Line released Final Destination 2 on January 31, 2003. By the end of the movie’s theatrical run, it had earned $6 million less domestically than Final Destination. The good news for the movie’s producers was that, by 2003, the film industry was benefiting hugely from a comparatively new and growing revenue source with the DVD format. DVDs debuted in Japan in November 1996 and in the US the next year. This new technology proved wildly popular, and by the end of 2000 the number of movies available to buy on DVD had grown to over 10,000. “DVD offset and allowed for so many more titles to be coming out,” says Perry. “It created this whole new revenue stream that allowed more volume to get made.”

In March 2005, The Hollywood Reporter announced that actors Ryan Merriman and Mary Elizabeth Winstead had been cast in a third Final Destination tale. Final Destination 3 was released on February 10, 2006, and earned $54 million in the US, slightly more than the first film in the franchise. According to producer Perry, “I knew [the DVD] would make so much fucking money for them that the prospect of making a fourth one would be a non-conversation, and it was.”

That fourth movie was titled The Final Destination and began with a dis-aster at a racetrack. The film was among the first to be shot utilizing the new 3D technology developed by James Cameron’s company Lightstorm Entertainment and showcased in the director’s 2009 blockbuster hit Avatar. “We always wanted to do 3D,” says Perry. “Remember, New Line is very scrappy. They did Odorama with John Waters for Polyester. They’re totally down with the William Castle school of let’s-get-butts-in-seats. So why not do it in 3D?”

The Final Destination was released in the summer of 2009 and earned $66 million in the US, the most money any of the films had grossed thus far. This box office success was helped by higher ticket prices at 3D screenings and the implication of the movie’s title that The Final Destination would wind up the franchise. Prior to its release, Perry himself believed the fourth film would be the last. “I figured that we’re done,” he says. “Then, lo and behold, opening weekend, we’re like, ‘Uh, okay, here we go.’ I don’t think the fourth one is good at all, actually it sucks. But it was successful enough to give us a chance to redeem ourselves with 5.”

Final Destination 5 was released in the summer of 2011 and earned a disappointing $42 million in the US. With DVD sales having peaked in 2007 and physical media entering a period of steep decline, New Line decided to press pause on a sixth film. “New Line felt, we’re going to sit tight for a little bit,” says Perry.

Jeffrey Reddick’s creative involvement with the franchise had effectively ended with Final Destination 2, but the writer is thrilled to remain associated with the franchise. “As a horror fan, I’m really grateful and humbled by the fact that something I started has had the life and the legs that it has,” he says. Reddick is also delighted when fans send him a reminder of one particular sequence from the franchise—which they do with regularity. “Almost every week, somebody sends me a photo of them behind a log truck,” he says.

Copyright © 2025 by Clark Collis. Courtesy of 1984 Publishing