In a recent article by The Hollywood Reporter New Line is restarting its Final Destination horror franchise and is swinging for a huge hit as they have hired Patrick Melton and Marcus Dunstan to write the script. If you are unfamiliar with these two here is some information for you, Melton and Dunstan are considered horror veterans known for writing several of the Saw movies. They also wrote Piranha 3DD and the upcoming Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark for CBS Films, excited yet? No well they are also tied to an untitled Christmas horror project set up at Sony and the highly anticipated The Reckoning at Paramount.
So, before you ask why Final Destination? Let’s think about it: For New Line’s business in the early 2000s it was a huge success and a great starting point of a new genre of Horror. The first movie protagonist was a character who has a premonition of a horrific and deadly event. The entire time they try to “cheat death” and saves the life of everyone as Death come, one by one, for each of them in chronological order of their supposed deaths.
Final Destination 1 was directed by James Wong made$112 million worldwide on less than a quarter of the budget. The other installments followed after making the franchise for New Line, a huge profit of over $700 million, WOW!
The great thing is that the plot details for the sixth installment reveal it will be a re-imagining of the franchise, but not a reboot which is great for any franchise to continue and not restart in most cases. Especially since every Movie is ideally its own story with the same formula; Lead characters cheat death and Death itself pursues them to complete its task.
Hopefully this will be successful as New Line is one of the few major companies consistently working with horror and being successful. From A Nightmare on Elm Street to its current upcoming releases of The Conjuring 3, New Annabelle being released in July and the much anticipated the second part of Stephen King’s IT. What else can we see recontinued? maybe Robert Englund in another ANOES especially after his Goldberg appearance last fall .
Horror Pulse 