All 6 Final Destination Movies, Ranked

Depending on who you ask, it’s either a very good or a very bad time for another Final Destination. Bloodlines, the sixth film in the series (and the first to hit theaters in more than a dozen years), arrives this weekend on a tailwind of scary headlines about rolled-back public-safety regulations and air-traffic-control hiccups. More generally, it’s also opening in the wake of COVID, which turned the mere act of breathing in public — and, uh, going to the movies — into a dicey proposition. Who wants a thriller about how everything can and will kill you when that’s pretty much the state of the world these days?

Then again, the world has always been a dangerous place. And the inability to truly insulate yourself from calamity is what Final Destination is all about. Developed from an X-Files spec script by Jeffrey Reddick, the 2000 original used the premise of a vindictive reaper — hunting down all those who dared cheat his design, then offing them through outlandish twists of fate and physics — to inflate our paranoia about the secret hazards of ordinary life. (It was basically You Could Slip on a Bar of Soap in the Shower and Break Your Neck: The Movie.) The sequels would expand on the diabolical intricacy of the Mouse Trap death scenes, upping the ante with ever more elaborate (and gross) set pieces. They’d also find their mordant sense of humor; there’s a case to be made that these movies are less thrillers than pitch-black splatter comedies. “Life’s a bitch and then you die, sometimes hideously,” they sneer — a joke told at the expense of the fragilely and anxiously mortal, a.k.a. everyone.

As of this writing, Bloodlines is rocking a surprisingly glowing 94 percent on Rotten Tomatoes. That’s a first for a series once roundly, regularly panned. Have standards plummeted, or have critics simply come around to the fiendish pleasures of a franchise so pitiless, it routinely kills off its entire cast of characters (sometimes more than once, given the obligatory premonition of doom that invariably sets the formulaic plot into motion)? Either way, it’s nice to see Final Destination get some overdue recognition. As the ranking below indicates, most of these movies are a hoot, keeping the laughs and jolts flying like loose pillars of lumber. And a couple of them are really to die for.

The Final Destination (2009)

Even the most, ahem, die-hard fan would probably concede that the fourth time was not the charm for Final Destination. Originally intended, per its title, to put the franchise to rest (until it inexplicably made more money than any other film in the series, inspiring another round of gruesome misfortune), this stereoscopic sequel finds the Grim Reaper going through the motions, dispatching the survivors of a digitally unconvincing racetrack mishap with much less ghoulish imagination than usual. How did the same director who staged the multi-car pileup of Final Destination 2 fail to get many thrills out of a malfunctioning escalator or — in a nod to Chuck Palahniuk’s “Guts” that could really stand to be grosser — a rogue swimming-pool pump? The only thing less memorable than the kills are the characters; they’re the blandest bags of meat Destination has ever fed through the grinder, which is really saying something. Only the cartoonish 3-D spectacle of eyeballs and entrails flying right at the viewer distinguishes this (blessedly short) installment from the superior movies stylishly recapped in the opening credits. It’s the one Final Destination that flatlines the fun of the premise.

Final Destination: Bloodlines (2025)

None of the typically grisly fatalities in the new Final Destination are as shocking as the brief moment when it gets almost … sentimental. It’s a parting cameo by the late Tony Todd, the franchise’s mortuary master of ceremonies, who was facing his own date with oblivion when he shot this affectionate, faintly touching farewell — surely the only time the series has treated death with anything approaching tenderness, rather than as one big, sick joke. Thankfully, the rest of this belated sixth entry offers all the sardonic, karmic sadism fans have missed since Destination went dormant back in 2011. Co-scripted by Guy Busick, who also helped revive Scream a few years ago, Bloodlines has been made in the grinning-skull image of its predecessors, albeit with a few fun new wrinkles, including an opening origin story that takes the franchise hundreds of stories up and a half-century back, and a clever legacy-sequel retcon that makes the curse hereditary. No truly legendary kills (except for maybe one involving a grandmother facing the end with defiant piss and vinegar), but give Death a break: He’s probably just a little rusty after 14 woefully Destination-less years.

Final Destination (2000)

Like Freddy Krueger or Michael Myers, the “killer” of Final Destination started small. There’s a comparative restraint to the carnage in Glen Morgan and James Wong’s original, which ingeniously tweaked the slasher-movie formula by subjecting doomed teenagers not to the knife of a masked maniac but to bizarre freak accidents that are actually anything but accidental. The first Destination, with its cast of recognizable young stars (Devon Sawa! Ali Larter! Stiffler!) and a feigned interest in the characters’ bereaved psychologies, is a more conventionally dramatic movie than the set-piece sizzle reels it spawned. Not necessarily a better movie, mind you; the series didn’t really hit its gloriously nasty stride until the sequel, when the Rube Goldbergian mishaps got more elaborate, gory, and irreverent. But even if you disregard the matter of influence and how Morgan and Wong laid the deadly runway for all that followed, there are plenty of highlights in their inaugural entry, including a goofy climax that sees Sawa’s hero chased by sparks of lightning (the closest these movies have ever come to physically personifying the threat). And if later Destinations would perfect the whole falling-dominos-of-death thing, did any of them pull off a more iconic, ironic jolt than poor Terry fatally failing to look both ways? If that kill doesn’t make you flinch, you’ve probably already dropped fucking dead.

Final Destination 5 (2011)

Two God-level sequences (as in, angry Old Testament God) elevate the fifth, once-final Destination above most of the rest. One of them is a nerve-racking, crosscutting game of misdirection and accumulating danger atop a balance beam. The other lines up a worst-case scenario for the ocularly sensitive. Both underscore how well this series, at its best, generates suspense from editing, while either subverting expectations or diabolically playing on common fears. Final Destination 5 suffers from a pretty dull ensemble of future corpses (the most boorish include David Koechner and Rugrat from The Wolf of Wall Street), going through the same cycle of disbelief and dread the death-list targets always experience in these movies. But as usual, how the characters are developed matters much less than how they’re dismembered. And in that department, part five really delivers, straight through to a clever twist ending that brings the series full circle while helping to account for why all the cosmetic details in the movie seem a little … outdated.

Final Destination 3 (2006)

The opening set piece of the last Destination on this list gets all the attention, but let’s spare a moment of appreciation for the amusement-park mayhem that kicks off the third film, which nightmarishly realizes every stray anxiety a roller-coaster rider might entertain on their way to the first big drop. Hopping back aboard the thrill ride they engineered, Wong and Morgan embrace the more merciless, darkly comic mechanics of part two and nearly surpass it in the process. The third Destination boasts arguably the cruelest kill (the tanning beds), the funniest (the weight machine), and one terrific moment at a fast-food drive-through that plays devilishly with distance and anticipation. And in securing Mary Elizabeth Winstead, then fully in her scream-queen era, the filmmakers for once provide a protagonist worth rooting for. (Likability goes a long way in a franchise that rarely gives any of its actors much to do beyond furrowing their brows and then screaming their heads off once they inevitably meet their maker.) Until this week’s acclaimed relaunch, critics have been consistently too tough on Final Destination. But the third might be the only one the fans underrate, too.

Final Destination 2 (2003)

What Psycho did for showers and Jaws did for the beach, Final Destination 2 did for logging trucks. Who could watch its opening pageant of vehicular destruction and not feel a pang of unease the next time they found themselves stuck in traffic behind a bundle of heavy lumber? Of course, the wicked power of this franchise’s best installment extends beyond its initial stretch on a highway to hell. By the bloody end, your phobias now include fire escapes, elevators, airbags, construction sites, even backyard barbecues. Energetically directed by former stuntman and blockbuster second-unit veteran David R. Ellis, Final Destination 2 refined the original’s chain-reaction logic of impending annihilation into a ruthless gallows humor. Every Destination since has followed its mean-spirited lead, but none have quite matched the sheer twisted glee in which it goes about shuffling off (and smashing and dicing and blowing up) mortal coils. More than the others, this disasterpiece finds the carrion-sweet spot between one kind of gag and the other: You’ll laugh, you’ll puke, you’ll pull your seat belt a little tighter.

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