The story behind the X-Files script that became Final Destination …….

Starting way back in 2000 Final Destination was a highly imaginative horror franchise that had audiences wrong footed by the often spectacularly imaginative set pieces resulting in the demise of the cast one by one. From a modest $23m budget the film earned over $112m worldwide. Since then we have had four further instalments including one in 3D with the last being in 2011. In total the films have made $663m with the last two films in the series being the most successful box office wise so it’s a mystery why we have had to wait fourteen years for another. But did you know that the original film that started it all was intended as an X-Files script ?

Originally titled ‘Flight 180’ by screenwriter Jeffrey Riddick after reading a magazine story about a woman who had a premonition about flying, disembarked and that same flight ended up crashing.

Written as a spec script the idea was that if she had cheated death, death would come after her. The script ended up with X-Files producers James Wong and Glen Morgan. The pair knew that the script would have to focus on Mulder and Scully and they would have to survive. Glen Morgan who would go on to co-write the script with Riddick had been given notes by New Line studios who didn’t like the idea and wanted Death as a character that would be chased by a pot-bellied sheriff. It was an idea that the two writers quickly kicked into touch because as much as anything how would you kill Death? So instead they configured the idea that instead Death would use everyday objects to kill off characters. The title was regarded as awful and Final Destination was soon replacing it, a title that was thought up by Brett Leitner, a friend of Reddick’s.

Scream with its teen cast had been out for a few years and the Final Destination characters which were adults were now changed to teenagers at the behest of the studio but with those teen tropes we have come to expect in horror flicks. In addition the writers, who loved Universal monster movies gave many of the characters Val Lewton, Schreck, Browning, as well as Hitchcock, Chaney and Murnau. Tony Todd’s mortician was there to lay down the rules and maybe he was Death? There were other layers to the film also. John Denver’s Rocky Mountain High playing in the airport (Denver dies in a plane accident) and Alex’s birthday was the doomed plane’s flight number amongst other sly references.

An omen occurred when filming a plane crash scene with a large gimbal set up at a height of 20 feet in the air, but after ten minutes, the gimbal malfunctioned and had to be manually dismantled by the cast who then had to descend using a long ladder to exit the location.

But the original end of the film was different from what we know now. The only way we can cheat death really is the next life, so it’s a much softer landing where Clear (Ali Larter) is pregnant and she’s going to have a baby but test audiences didn’t like it and the studio head told them to change it. So the end was tweaked but it made no difference, audiences still didn’t like it.

Director and co-writer James Wong explained, ‘We had to go at least try to do it in a way that made sense to close the stories of these characters. So we had this kind of time skip, which allowed us for them to fulfill their quest, which is, “We’re going to go to France to do what we didn’t get to do when we first started out this adventure.” So, we came up with the bigger ending where you basically said, you can’t escape death.

The test audiences now loved it and it set the template for the following movies.

2025-03-18 03:25

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