After a 14-year hiatus, the Final Destination franchise is returning to the big screen with the upcoming Final Destination: Bloodlines. Viewers looking to get into the 25-year-old horror franchise can use our guide to find out how to watch all the Final Destination movies in order before the new one.
The franchise started in 2000 with the release of Final Destination. The film follows Alex Browning (Devon Sawa), a young man who has a premonition that the airplane he’s on will explode mid-air. He and his friends get off the plane before take-off, only to later learn that the aircraft exploded in a catastrophic accident, killing every passenger on board. However, when the survivors start dying in freak accidents, Browning realizes they can’t just cheat Death.
Final Destination set itself apart from other slash films with its premonition premise and decision to make the killer the unseen entity Death. The fact that there are real-life stories of premonition saving lives made the premise even more chilling. As a result, the film was a box office success and spawned a franchise. Every film in the series follows the same premise of a group of people avoiding Death due to one individual’s premonition, only to be picked off by the entity one by one in the order they were originally intended to die in.
While each movie follows the same formula, they often introduce new rules/exceptions to Death’s vengeance and sometimes shake things up for fun. For example, in the sequel, Final Destination 2, when Kimberly Corman (A. J. Cook) saves a group of travelers from a highway pile-up, Death begins picking off survivors in reverse order. Meanwhile, in the standalone sequel Final Destination 3, amusement park accident survivor Wendy Christensen (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) realizes photos taken before the incident include clues of how Death will claim the survivors.
The filmmakers intended for the fourth movie, The Final Destination, to be the last film in the series. Although the story of Nick O’Bannon’s (Bobby Campo) premonition of a race car accident ends with a note of finality, Final Destination 5 was greenlit and premiered in 2011. The movie brought the franchise back to its roots by making it a prequel to the original film. Eight years later, Final Destination: Bloodlines was revealed to be in development. It is unknown where the movie takes place in the Final Destination universe and if it will uphold the previous films’ formula, but it has been described as a “reimagining” of the franchise.
How to watch the Final Destination movies in order
Watching the Final Destination movies in chronological order isn’t too difficult. With the exception of the prequel, Final Destination 5, the films follow the release date order. Check out the chronological order below:
- Final Destination 5
- Final Destination
- Final Destination 2
- Final Destination 3
- The Final Destination
Where to watch all Final Destination movies online
Check out our list below for the release date order and where to stream the Final Destination movies in the U.S.!
