The Big Picture

Final Destination creator Jeffrey Reddick details the real-life article that inspired the iconic film franchise. Reddick goes on to recap his journey at New Line Cinema, a journey that proved pivotal to making a Final Destination movie a reality. He also emphasizes the importance of making such a project with an organization like the Writers Guild of America.

Final Destination is a fictional story, but the idea that inspired the screenplay was actually a real-life article.

While doing an interview in celebration of his new film, Til Death Do Us Part which hits theaters on August 4th, Final Destination creator Jeffrey Reddick took a moment to look back on the early days of the Final Destination concept, recapping how the idea went from an article to the big screen.

The Final Destination franchise is currently five films in with a sixth installment expected to go into production in the near future. (Depending on when the AMPTP gets its act together and pays writers and actors what they deserve, of course.) The first film sees a group of high school students board a Paris-bound plane, but just before take-off, Alex (Devon Sawa) insists they rush off because he had a premonition of the plane exploding in midair. After Alex and six others deboard, Flight 180 takes off and does indeed explode. However, it turns out, the survivors are not in the clear. They were meant to die on that flight and “death’s design” will circle back for them.

Image Via New Line Cinema

During the Final Destination portion of our conversation, Reddick recalled the article that started it all:

“I was flying home to Kentucky and I read an article about a woman who was on a flight, she was in Hawaii, I think, and her mom called her and said, ‘Don’t take the flight you’re on tomorrow. I have a bad feeling about it.’ So she switched flights, and the plane that she was supposed to be on crashed. And so that put the idea in my head, which is interesting because what struck me about that is that it made me think about premonitions in a way, because I do believe there are people out there that have gifts, whether it’s psychic kind of gifts or whatever. I’ve never been able to levitate. I’ve tried it. After reading X-Men, I tried it many times and failed. But I do believe that people have gifts, and I do believe in fate.”

In fact, Reddick is a big believer that it was fate that scored him a gig at New Line Cinema, a job that wound up being key to making Final Destination a reality.

“An indie film that inspired me was A Nightmare on Elm Street. Actually, I credit that whole movie with my career.” After falling in love with the Wes Craven-directed classic, Reddick went on to get a job at the company that produced it, New Line Cinema. Reddick added, “Nightmare made [New Line] a studio.”

While he does credit his own determination with earning a job at a company he admired so deeply, he also believes “it was fate also that [New Line founder] Bob [Shaye] responded to me when I was this 14-year-old kid from Kentucky who had no idea how the film business worked.” Reddick explained that it all began with him “pestering” Shaye to read an Elm Street prequel idea he’d written and ended with Reddick working at New Line Cinema for 11 years. Final Destination was made during that 11-year run.

Image via New Line Cinema

To offer more clarity on the process of bringing an idea from page to screen, Reddick continued by explaining how the Final Destination concept evolved as more people got involved in the project:

“I love telling this story because the people have this weird idea about how the industry works. It was 10 years from the day that I graduated high school that I sold the treatment for Final Destination, but then I had to rework it so much before New Line even bought it, and then it got reworked a lot, for the better, I love how the film turned out, by James Wong and Glen Morgan, who came on to write and direct it. That’s what people don’t understand a lot of times about the business is it’s so hard to even get a movie made, but there are so many steps that it takes to make it happen that it can not happen at any point.”

Reddick went on to emphasize the value of making such projects through organizations meant to protect artists and ensure they reap the benefits of their creation’s success, organizations like the Writers Guild of America. He explained:

“Writers only get paid if the movie gets made and goes into profit, and luckily they did Final Destination through the guild. If they hadn’t done it through the guild, I probably wouldn’t have seen any money from it after the first one came out.”

While Reddick’s involvement varied from installment to installment, he is now widely known as the godfather of the Final Destination franchise and uses that notoriety to pursue a personal passion – supporting independent filmmakers. To hear more about those projects including his collaborations with Til Death Do Us Part director Timothy Woodward Jr., check out our full conversation in the video interview below: