FINAL DESTINATION To Receive More Final Entries

Final Destination is one of my favourite horror franchises. It's essentially a death-scene generator, packed full of characters who exist basically to deliver a few obligatory character beats then to die in elaborate yet mundane Rube Goldberg deathtraps (and Tony Todd, who's there to be chill and ominous). It's a franchise where nobody feels bad about cheering for a good kill, and the kills are generally really, really good. You don't really get a more bluntly iconic villain than the unseen force of Death itself.

The series also bore the dubious honour of becoming increasingly inaccurately named as it went on (with The Final Destination being the least-accurate of the lot), and now it's about to become even more so. According to THR, New Line is rebooting the series, or at least "re-imagining" it, with Marcus Dunstan and Patrick Melton on board to write.

Dunstan and Melton, of course, were the writers behind Saws IV, V, VI, and 3D, as well as the Feast series and the wild, underrated The Collector / The Collection. Their oeuvres revolve almost entirely around intricate death machines and traps, and it's not much of a stretch to imagine them creating said traps out of everyday items rather than rusty steel and fishhooks. Whether they can tell a decent story in the process is somewhat immaterial, but given that the last entry in the franchise actually innovated in that area for the first time in five movies, one hopes that trend might continue.

And for what it's worth: Final Destination 5 is the best one, because it created genuine dramatic tension between the characters; Final Destination 2 (from the director of Homeward Bound II: Lost In San Francisco, may he rest in peace) is the second best, because it was the first to grasp the potential of what the series could be; Final Destination is the third best, for having the damn idea in the first place; and that's where the list ends. For now.