Of all the new horror franchises we've gotten in the last 20 years, my favorite is New Line Cinema's FINAL DESTINATION, and I really liked the "new movie every three years" release pattern they had going on. (And that we only had to wait two years for FINAL DESTINATION 5 after the lesser fourth film.) Now we've gone eight years without a new FINAL DESTINATION movie, and I've been anxiously waiting for an announcement that New Line is going to move forward with another entry in the series. That announcement has now arrived, although there's a word in it that makes me slightly nervous.
New Line Cinema has hired screenwriters Patrick Melton and Marcus Dunstan – writers of the FEAST trilogy, PIRANHA 3DD, SAW 4 through 7, and the duo who nearly make a "recalibration" of the HALLOWEEN franchise a few years ago – to write what is being referred to as a "re-imagination" of the FINAL DESTINATION franchise.
I hope the word "re-imagination" is only being thrown out there because the idea is inventive and unexpected, like the idea producer Craig Perry was pursuing a while back of setting the sixth film in the 1100s, and not because there's going to be an attempt to re-invent the wheel here. The FINAL DESTINATION series works perfectly as it has always been:
a character has a premonition of a horrific and deadly event, cheats his or her own death and saves several other lives in the process, only to have Death, as a personified but unstoppable force, come for the survivors one by one.
Whatever Melton and Dunstan are cooking up, I hope it will be as fun as the films that preceded it.
This is the concept trailer that was cut together for the "dark ages" idea, and may have nothing to do with what Melton and Dunstan are working on.