Final Destination Bloodlines Broke A Shocking Premonition Trend That’s Defined The Franchise

Final Destination Bloodlines made a surprising change to the franchise’s approach to premonitions. The 2025 movie is the sixth installment in the supernatural horror franchise, which kicked off in 2000 with FInal Destination. The original movie starred Devon Sawa as Alex Browning, a high school student who has a premonition of his class’s plane crashing while on a trip to Paris. When he and several others leave the plane amid his panic, they survive the disaster, only to have Death itself hunt them down and kill them in a variety of gory ways as vengeance for escaping their designated fates.

Generally, each of the subsequent Final Destination movies has added a new wrinkle, including Death’s list working in reverse, pH๏τographs offering clues about victims’ deaths, and the fact that killing a person will give the murderer their victim’s remaining lifespan. However, in general, every movie in the franchise follows the same basic structure and includes many of the same tropes, such as premonitions, Tony Todd playing mortician William Bludworth, and a blend of surprise deaths with more drawn-out Rube Goldberg-esque sequences. However, Bloodlines, which adds the twist of Death targeting a family, ignores one of the franchise’s biggest recurring elements.

Final Destination Bloodlines Never Has A Premonition About Stefani & Her Family’s Deaths

The Movie’s Premonition Is From Before They Were Born

The biggest change in the new movie is the fact that the premonition of a 1968 disaster at the Skyview tower restaurant is actually had by Iris Campbell (Brec Bᴀssinger), the grandmother of the movie’s protagonist Stefani Reyes (Kaitlyn Santa Juana). The deaths in Final Destination Bloodlines are a direct result of Iris averting the disaster, meaning that her descendants were never supposed to exist. However, at no point does Stefani ever have her own premonition of said pool of victims, the Reyes and Campbell families, dying in one huge disaster.

Final Destination Movies Always Include Premonitions Where The Main Characters Die

All 5 Previous Movies Followed This Pattern

A closeup of Devon Sawa as Alex Browning in Final Destination 2000

By not having a premonition of the main cast collectively dying in a singular disaster, 2025’s Final Destination Bloodlines eschews the precedent set by every previous installment. Although the other movies in the horror franchise feature different disasters, new protagonists having the premonitions, and new groups of characters around them who find themselves becoming targets of Death, each of them has stuck to the formula established by the original movie.

The Final Destination Franchise

тιтle

Year

Final Destination

2000

Final Destination 2

2003

Final Destination 3

2006

The Final Destination

2009

Final Destination 5

2011

Final Destination Bloodlines

2025

In order, the premonitions that followed Alex Browning’s vision of the grim fate of Flight 180 were Kimberly Corman’s (A. J. Cook) vision of a multi-car pileup on the freeway, Wendy Christensen’s (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) premonition of a roller coaster derailment during grad night at an amusement park, Nick O’Bannon (Bobby Campo) foreseeing a racetrack crumbling around him following a high-speed car crash, and Sam Lawton (Nicholas D’Agosto)’s premonition of a bridge collapse claiming the lives of himself and his coworkers. In each case, the protagonist and the other core characters were directly involved in the premonition.

Final Destination Bloodlines Breaking The Premonition Trend Was For The Best

The Change Works In The Context Of The Movie

While the way its premonition plays into the story goes against franchise tradition, Final Destination Bloodlines justifies this change through sheer cleverness. It simultaneously allows Death to target a single family line, which is another break from tradition, without ignoring the fact that any installment in the franchise is expected to open with a ᴅᴇᴀᴅly premonition. This choice also makes sense in canon, because their deaths are still the direct result of the Skyview incident, so it is not technically necessary for them to avoid a separate disaster that puts them on Death’s list.

Final Destination 2 had a similar setup, with the highway accident designed to claim the lives of a disparate group of people who all had their lives saved by survivors of the Flight 180 crash, and still managed to have a franchise-standard premonition. However, the fact that there is no premonition involving the Campbell and Reyes families in Final Destination Bloodlines still makes sense, because they are not the only families involved. It may have been beyond Death’s capabilities to arrange the simultaneous murder of the hundreds of people from various generations that are on its post-Skyview list.

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