How an ‘X-Files’ Script Birthed the Unstoppable ‘Final Destination’ Franchise

Before “Final Destination,” cheating death never seemed so fun.

Directed by James Wong from a screenplay he wrote with Glen Morgan, based on a story by Jeffrey Reddick, the film came out of nowhere on March 17, 2000, to hit moviegoers like a bus. Based around its characters dying from an intricate but outwardly mundane sequence of events, its premise would quickly become cultural shorthand for dangerous, naturally occurring Rube Goldberg scenarios and spawn a beloved horror franchise whose sixth installment, “Final Destination Bloodlines,” arrives in theaters May 16.

Yet even before “The X-Files” executive producers Wong and Morgan got involved with the project, “Final Destination” would never have existed without the science fiction television show. It was Reddick’s favorite at the time, and he wrote the original story as a spec script for the show to land a TV agent before producer Chris Bender recommended he develop it as a feature. In precisely the sort of coincidence that would become synonymous with the film series, Wong and Morgan picked up Reddick’s premise and ran with it, building out a mythology that has led to increasingly elaborate set pieces — and even bigger commercial success. Meanwhile, even if it hadn’t let their characters survive death’s invisible design, the film additionally helped catapult a series of young actors to greater success, including Devon Sawa, Ali Larter, Kerr Smith, Seann William Scott and Amanda Detmer.

To commemorate the 25^th anniversary of “Final Destination,” EbMaster spoke with key members of the film’s creative team, and several actors who helped bring it to life.

(These interviews have been edited and condensed.)

“Final Destination” began as “Flight 180,” a script Jeffrey Reddick says he conceived after reading a magazine story about a woman who had a premonition about flying, and disembarked from a plane that ended up crashing.

Jeffrey Reddick (Story By): When I read the article, it just went into my head: what if she “cheated” death, and what would that look like if death decided to come after her? I wrote that idea as an “X-Files” [spec script] … so it was very serendipitous that we ended up having the film go to [“The X-Files” executive producers] James Wong and Glen Morgan, who were two of my favorite writers of all time.

If we were to develop this idea as an “X-Files” episode, the focus would be on Mulder and Scully and how they deal with a series of mysterious deaths. In this case, their survival is at stake. However, if we turned it into a movie, the primary goal would be to create something visually stunning and full of unexpected twists that would captivate audiences. This level of spectacle and unpredictability is challenging to achieve in a television series due to budget and time constraints.

Reddick: The original story was very “A Nightmare on Elm Street”-influenced, where Death played with their survivor’s guilt or some secrets that they had to drive them to suicide, which was pretty dark.

Glen Morgan (Cowriter/ Producer): Our agent said, “Here’s this treatment — these guys at New Line want you to do it.” It was like 15 pages, but I never read past page three because Death was like [the Death character in] Woody Allen’s “Love and Death.” It had a sickle and a hood, and it had a potbellied sheriff going after him. And Jim and I were like, “No.”

Wong: I think New Line and Bob Shaye were afraid of the idea of little inanimate objects becoming your demise, so they wanted some kind of explanation or feeling of that or something else out there.

Morgan: On the way into New Line, Jim and I were like, “What are we going to do? You can’t see Death. That’s ridiculous. And you can’t kill Death — that’s even more ridiculous.” And we had a meeting with [executive producers] Richard Brener and Brian Witten and they go, “Look, it goes like this, death is a force. You don’t see it.”

Reddick: What I loved was when James and Glen came and wrote the shooting script is they fought to make sure that there was no death. And I think their idea to do the Rube Goldberg thing where death kind of uses everyday things around us was genius.

Kerr Smith (“Carter Horton”): When I got hired, the name of the film was “Flight 180” — not a good title. I was talking to either [producer] Craig Perry or Glen on set one day and I was like, “This title’s terrible.” He goes, “Yeah, I know. We’re figuring it out.” And I’d say a week later he comes back and he goes, “Final Destination.” I was like, “Oh, that’s perfect.”

It was entirely due to my friend Brett Leitner that we have the concept of “Final Destination.”)

With a handful of foundational elements in hand from Reddick’s story, Morgan and Wong started working on the shooting script. The duo layered in references that created an ominous tone, and name-checked horror legends of yesteryear.

Reddick: I wrote [the characters] as adults was because that was what I had done in the “X-Files” spec. But “Scream” came out and the studio said, “Why don’t we make them teenagers?” So I used a lot of the teen archetypes in the original script that also are in the shooting script that James and Glen wrote.

Morgan: Where it all started for me was the Universal monster movies, and I just wanted to pay homage to them so hopefully some kid, if they liked this movie, they would go, “I’ll go see a F. W. Murnau or a Tod Browning movie.”

Wong: We wanted Alex to be an everyman. We wanted him to be the kids that we were in high school that Glen and I were — we weren’t complete nerds or anything, but just a normal kid that kind of skated by in the middle ground and nothing actually happens to these kids. The main audience, all of us mainly are middle ground kids.

To respond to that argument, you might need a character similar to Clear, played by Ali Larter, who would say something like, “I somewhat agree with your point.” In high school, these are often the girls who read books such as “Tropic of Cancer” [as Clear does in the movie].

We designed our character, Clear, based on a real assistant of ours who was both spiritual and an artist. To reflect her enlightened and artistic nature, we developed her as such. Regarding Kerr Smith’s character, we wanted him to meet his demise at some point, yet keep him alive until the final moments.

Morgan: And it was nice to have an adult in there who could watch Alex and go, “I’m really afraid of you.” That’s [the teacher] Valerie Lewton. What I find interesting is how many kids when they’re younger say, “I hate that character because she’s mean to Alex.” And then when they’re older, they understand.

Kristen Cloke (“Ms. Lewton”): I always saw Ms. Lewton as the emotional chorus for the movie. She’s not one of the kids and she’s not the detective. She’s this character that’s there, and every time you see her she’s telling you, “If you were living through this, this is how you would be feeling, because it’s really weird.”

Wong: After working on a show with FBI guys, and one of the first thing we thought was, “Well, how do we explain some of these things that people are saying in their heads without their parents talking about it?” And these authority characters gave us the opportunity to say things to each other that would explain why they were or weren’t being scrutinized.

Roger Guenveur Smith (“Agent Schreck”): Daniel [Roebuck] and I tried to work against the typical buddy cop thing where I’m the good guy, you’re the bad guy. There were opportunities there to do as supporting actors, but we were able to create a certain psychology.

Morgan: Then you needed a comic relief, which is Sean William Scott. And then you needed “a guide at the edge of the forest.” Jim and I had just had a catastrophic TV series where we had met Tony Todd and we’re like, “It’s Tony Todd,” to be [William Bludworth], that guide.

Reddick: The great thing that James and Glen did with Tony Todd is introducing him as a mortician — just kind of laying down enough rules so that you wonder if he’s death or if he’s connected to death.

Wong: [William Bludworth’s speech] basically is the theme of the movie, and it could have been nothing without the right actor. God rest his soul, he gave it the right amount of gravitas, but also the right amount of entertainment. He always has that kind of lilt or something where you go, “Is he with me?” So he’s just perfect.

Some of the actors had more experience than others: Devon Sawa started working in 1994 at age 16. Kerr Smith was then a series regular on the WB teen drama “Dawson’s Creek.” Roger Guenveur Smith and Kristen Cloke were established film and television actors. Ali Larter, Seann William Scott (“Billy Hitchcock”) and Amanda Detmer (“Terry Chaney”) were just beginning their careers.

Kerr Smith: It was a mismash of personalities.

Devon was intriguing as our experience seemed to be roughly the same despite his being younger than me.

Kerr Smith: Seann and I spent a lot of time together. He’d recently wrapped up “American Pie,” which hadn’t been released yet, so he was still unknown. I told him, “Man, you’re on the verge of stardom. Get ready!

As one of the older members within the asylum, I needed to approach the situation with maturity and understanding. We all resided in the same hotel, which put me in close proximity with Ali Larter and Kerr Smith at the gym. Navigating this fresh wave of talent required a delicate balance of respect and tact.

Rather than surprising the audience with the plane crash that sets off Death’s design, each iteration of the script opens with a sense of foreboding that something is wrong.

Morgan: It was probably [inspired by] the people that Jim and I looked up to, like Alfred Hitchcock. It’s 30 minutes until Janet Leigh gets in the shower [in “Psycho”], but there’s just such a tone of dread. So it was just a choice we made that it might be a minute before he got on the airplane and you should have a feeling that something’s coming.

Wong: Really it starts with a title sequence, when the pages flip, and Alex’s dad talks about taking the tags off of the suitcase because it is good luck. I think Glen and I were more superstitious when we were younger than we actually are now. So that was just part of our personality, thinking, well, this movie is about this premonition, so these guys are already on that path where they’re going to die.

James and Glen are skilled at weaving visual narratives, which means details like Alex’s birthday matching the flight number create an initial sense of unease in the viewer.

Morgan: The other stuff is just, as a writer, you collect things. I was at Vancouver airport and it was a Buddy Holly song [playing over the loudspeakers] and he died in a plane crash. I turned it around because [John Denver’s] “Rocky Mountain High” is a little weirder.

We were surprised to acquire the rights to the John Denver song. It seemed that they might not have read the entire script, but we thought that using a popular culture reference – since he tragically died in a plane crash – would make a strong connection with the audience.

Morgan: It’s just things in life that you become superstitious about. One of my things is, if I’m getting on a plane, I look at the door to see if the paint is chipped. I’m like, “Is this maintained?” And we have a little push in as Alex is getting on the plane, and I can’t tell you how many people in 25 years have gone, “I do that too.”

Determining how the characters would die took some imagination.

Wong: The hardest thing to do was really the plane crash, because it was the biggest, logistically, to pull off. There’s lots of characters in it, and you have to set the mold of how things would work in this movie and the details we want to put into it.

Morgan: That plane was enormous. It was on a big gimbal and you had to walk everybody up 10 or 20 feet up in the air, with a joystick and explosions. That was really tough. And we had a line producer, Art Schaeffer, who had worked on movies with Michael Mann, to help us out.

Kerr Smith described an incident where there was someone operating a device that moved erratically, similar to a roller coaster. After about 10 minutes, the machine broke, causing everyone to have to exit it using a ladder since it couldn’t be fixed on the spot.

Wong: The problem with the “Final Destination” movies is that the beginning set piece was always so much bigger and better and more exciting almost than anything else that followed, so it became a real challenge to top yourself with each set piece.

One summer day, I was waiting to cross the street near Highland Avenue and Hollywood Bowl, when a man next to me stepped off the curb just as a bus passed by. A person behind him quickly pulled him back, and everyone around us let out a collective gasp. It was a very frightening moment that has stayed with me ever since. Jim and I discussed it later, and we joked that it would be interesting if instead it had been a girl who got hit by the bus.

John: During our testing, it functioned so flawlessly that viewers were still engaged with it, causing them to miss the subsequent scene due to their continued reactions.

Morgan: But the bus hit, when we did it, it didn’t work. It was a $30,000 prosthetic Amanda, and it got hit by the bus and we were like, “Oh.” So the editors, Logan and Jim Coblentz, came back and they used the bus as a wipe. We knew that you had to have some reactions, so we immediately went out and got Kristen and Devon and sprayed blood on them with a paintbrush. And I don’t know why, but Amanda has that line, “You can go fucking drop dead.” That has an importance to the effect of the bus hit too. I don’t know why, but I think it distracts people or something like that.

It seems to me that Miss Lewton’s death is extremely agonizing. She appears to have died multiple times, eventually giving in to her wounds.

Cloke: I’m a little claustrophobic, so having to do a body cast and a face cast for me is never my most favorite thing, but that was a big part of it, and then I’m buried under the floor, and people just walked over my head during the day. So I became a fixture of the floor for a couple of days.

Morgan: She’s a wonderful actor, so Kristin has been killed or gone crazy in everything we’ve done because it’s hard to do and Jim and I really trust her. I think it was more to it — I don’t know if she burned up or somebody trimmed it. I remember the first time her dad saw it when I had it in a rough cut, and he was like, “Make it stop.”

The original ending of “Final Destination” was more philosophical about the film’s premise. The creative team quickly realized horror audiences wanted something punchier.

At the outset, during the initial draft of the film, we concluded that the true way to circumvent death lies in the subsequent life. Thus, it’s a gentler transition as Clear becomes pregnant and is expecting a child.

Let’s proceed with the directions provided.

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We decided to go ahead and try it out, reminiscent of something we would have done on “The X-Files.” And we did so, but there was an unexpected result – the atmosphere in that theater seemed to lose its energy.

Wong: [Studio head] Bob Shaye was the first one who sat us down and said, “Hey, okay, you got to change the ending.” We were at that point still going, “We have a vision to convey.” And so to [New Line production head] Michael De Luca’s credit, they gave us another test screening. I had made some changes in edit because we thought, well, maybe it was something that is not clear in the body of the movie. And the scores pretty much came back the same, and we realized that, “Okay, Bob, you’re right.”

Morgan: He was like, “I want another bus hit that ends this movie.” And I knew that what we had was not the answer, so Jim and I went to the Santa Monica Formosa, and Jim goes, “They go to Paris.”

Wong: 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.

Morgan: It was amazing — after the first test screening, you get those ridiculous sheets and all the words are written misspelled and written with a big pencil like, “Morons,” and like, “I liked it. It was violent.” “Acting sucks, more violence.” Oh, it was depressing. And then without changing a frame other than the new ending, all those notes went away. And pretty much by the third film, we were just going, “Okay, let’s just kill everybody.” The test screening basically gave us the format for the movie and the subsequent movies.

“Final Destination” opened in theaters with $10 million, and lingered in the top ten for seven weeks, earning $112 million worldwide. Its four sequels each earned more than $90 million each, and 2009’s “The Final Destination” earned more than double that during its theatrical release.

Wong: It was my first movie and I’m proud of it, and I’m very happy that I was part of it. It gave me a lot of opportunities and I’m pretty happy that it is a success. I still point to it and go, “Wow, we did something that’s 25 years later still going…” So I’m very proud of that.

Morgan: I’m proud of what Jim and I brought to this, which I got to say I think is extensive, the whole Rube Goldbergness. But it was, Reddick had an idea and then New Line produced it, and it was really collaborative. There was a lot of people that made it work along the way, and I appreciate it, and I was really honored when you see, “Wow, somebody made a sequel out of something I did.” I couldn’t believe it.

Kerr Smith: It was my first big film, so it’ll always have a special place in my heart. When I was a young actor, I used to think, “Man, I’d love to be a part of a franchise.” And then sure enough, “Final Destination” becomes this huge, huge thing. So that’s pretty special for me.

Roger Guenveur Smith: It was refreshing being exposed to the eagle in flight, to the Orca, to the bear, having that opportunity to breathe in nature. Shit, it got me health insurance. I’m not hating on it at all. And [my character] survived. So I was hoping that I would come back for more. The FBI investigation maybe goes on and I’m part of it and become the head investigator.

Cloke: I rarely look at “Final Destination” through the lens of myself. I think it’s easier to view it through Jim and Glen’s success, and I feel so proud of him and Jim, and the creation of that franchise, which was so, so clever what they did and how they made that work I think was so smart. And they created a franchise. It’s pretty amazing. I feel grateful to be part of it, but I certainly take credit for nothing.

Morgan: My last gig was, I had worked on Jordan Peele’s “Twilight Zone,” and they used Lily Amirpour and Justin Moorhead and a lot of younger directors. And at some point during the shoot — not when they met me, but it would take them a minute to go, “I just got to tell you what ‘Final Destination’ means to me.” It’s interesting because it used to be, “I’ve got to tell you what ‘The X-Files’ means.” And now that that movie has an influence on young filmmakers the way that AIP movies or Spielberg and Hitchcock movies did to me. I’m not equating them — I’m not nuts. But that you excited some filmmakers to go, “I want to do this,” that’s the best part of this series doing well.

2025-03-17 18:35