It may not have been everyone’s cup of tea, but considering the fact that major horror film franchises are going the way of the dodo, it’s not out of the ordinary to ponder the last stop in a series… or, the final film. Among the many elaborate and brutal death scenes, there must have been some level of charisma in the Final Destination series as the New Line Cinema features maintained a modest lucrative gross with each original movie distributed between 2000 and 2011. This could be attributed to each film having a different cumulative mass death scenario and because new rules were invented with each film that would help the characters cheat death. A scheduled one release every three years was in affect up until 2011, which saw the fifth film hit theaters, and then… nothing.
According to Final Destination 5 director and franchise star Tony Todd, Warner Bros. (who merged with New Line Cinema) would greenlight a sixth movie in the series if Final Destination 5 proved to be another box office success story. Looking at the statistics online, Final Destination 5 took the #3 spot during its first week in release, making $24,650,000 in America alone. It free-falled after that, though, and ended up with a nine week total of $42,590,000. This wouldn’t seem like a flop by any means, however, the title’s production budget was $40,000,000 and between two and three million need to be factored into that to cover promotional costs. Final Destination 5 barely scraped by and didn’t make the studio any extra money except for $9,280,000 in Blu-ray and DVD sales, which also took a chunk of change to mass produce.
Case and point, Final Destination 5 just didn’t stack up to the success of the previous films. For example, The Final Destination (2009) managed to make the studio an extra $15,000,000 on top of its full production cost.
I think, obviously, the lack of interest in Final Destination 5 dashed a lot of the confidence that a sixth film needed to be made. I use the word “needed” instead of “had to” because, really, six films in, did we really need another Final Destination? When would there be one too many? When would executives find themselves beating a dead horse with a stick? As much as these films found a loyal fan base and secured their place in the top 10 lists of millennial horror film franchises, everything in Hollywood is a numbers game and things are tight right now unless you’re producing Jurassic World or Star Wars. I find it hard to believe that this serious could evolve and survive as a straight-to-DVD set because a smaller budget means smaller death scenes and that was always the bread-earner in these movies.
Could we see another Final Destination in the future? Maybe. They could always pull a Scream 4 and make a new movie 2021, but we saw how an eleven yea gap hurt that film. Unfortunately, I think the series is all but dead and buried now, as everyone is scrambling to make the next big remake or found footage ghost story. On the flip side, the story and all of its elements adapted to novels and comic books in the mid-2000’s. So if you’re hungry for a new mass accident plot where magnificent death comes to reclaim its pawns, I suggest you head over to Amazon and purchase those. That way the world of Final Destination can survive with you for a little longer.
