Final Destination Bloodlines directors Adam Stein and Zach Lipovsky hopped on the Zoom call to end all Zoom calls to try and direct the latest movie in the horror franchise – which got them the gig and then some.
“Many people know that directors often have to audition just like actors do to get hired on bigger films like this,” Lipovsky tells GamesRadar+. “And you go through many different rounds of callbacks, and we got to the final Zoom where there was all the big head honcho important people. And it was on Zoom, so we thought, you know what? It could be really fun to give them the experience of what it’s like to watch a Final Destination movie because FD movies have a really unique tone.”
Bloodlines follows Stefani (Kaitlyn Santa Juana) a college student who realizes she has the gift of premonition, which she inherited from her grandmother Iris, but when she goes home to look into her family history – she suddenly finds herself in a chain of freak deaths involving her family members.
“They’re both horrifying and graphic, but they’re also fun and surprising. And you’re kind of covering your eyes, but also smiling at the same time,” Lipovsky continues. “And it’s really difficult when you’re pitching a movie to pitch what it’s gonna feel like to watch the movie, because you can say, ‘it’s gonna be surprising, and it’s gonna be gory, and it’s gonna be fun.’ But to actually give them that experience was sort of our goal. While pitching, they were watching us do the end of our pitch – and the background behind us, there was a fireplace that started to light the wall on fire, at which point they all started pointing, thinking it was real.”
“We got up, and Adam started putting the fire out with a fire extinguisher. I turned on this giant ceiling fan, yelling if I should call 911. And then we put out the fire, and they all started clapping, realizing that it was kind of a joke. And then, as we sat down apologizing and trying to get back into our pitch, the ceiling fan started to spark and fall off the ceiling.
“I jumped out of the way, and it chopped Adam’s head off. Blood exploded all over the place, and his decapitated body fell out. And I came back in to kind of, you know, get the pitch back on track. We did it with these kind of crazy different ways of using Zoom technology to both make it live and prerecorded in a way that was seamless from their perspective, and they quite enjoyed it.”
Final Destination, written by Jeffrey Reddick and directed by James Wong, hit theaters in 2000, and grossed $112 million against a budget of just $23 million. A sequel, Final Destination 2, was released in 2003, followed by Final Destination 3 in 2006 – which creator Reddick did not want to be apart of.
The franchise would then go into different hands, with David R. Ellis (Snakes on a Plane) directing from a screenplay by Eric Bess (The Butterfly Effect). The Final Destination was released in 2009, and Final Destination 5 (directed by Steven Quale) and written by Arrival scribe Eric Heisserer) in 2011 – which was, at the time, meant to be the final movie in the franchise.
In 2019, New Line Cinema announced that a new Final Destination was in the works, initially with Saw franchise writers Patrick Melton and Marcus Dunstan. By 2022, Andor writer Lori Evans Taylor had written the script with Guy Busick based on a story they had developed with Jon Watts. Stein and Lipovsky had their audition with Warner Bros later that year – and the rest is history.
Final Destination Bloodlines hits theaters on May 16. For more, check out our list of the most exciting upcoming movies in 2025 and beyond.
