2025 is shaping up to be a great year for horror films, with both new entries and old franchise favorites finding success at the box office. In fact, one horror movie series that hasn’t been around for over a decade made a roaring comeback this year, to the point that it now sits as the second-highest-grossing horror movie of the year so far (behind Ryan Coogler’s Sinners).
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Now HBO Max has announced the streaming premiere date for Final Destination: Bloodlines, and it will be available to subscribers even sooner than they think. In less than a week (at the time of writing this), horror fans will be able to stream Final Destination: Bloodlines on HBO Max, beginning on August 1st.
What Is Final Destination: Bloodlines About?
A teenage girl named Stefani Reyes (Kaitlyn Santa Juana) has recurring nightmares of a tower collapse in the 1960s. She discovers that these nightmares are a premonition she inherited from her grandmother, who had predicted the collapse of the building and saved many people from dying. However, when members of her family actually start dying in horrific freak accidents, Stefani seeks out her estranged grandmother and inadvertently inherits the dark legacy of trying to outmaneuver Death’s Design. The young girl must scramble to unravel how to not only save herself but her entire bloodline from being wiped out before Death can complete its work.
SPOILER-FREE Review
The Final Destination series was built on the novel device of Death’s Design being carried out through Rube Goldberg-style sequences, featuring minor accidents or hazards that lead someone to a grisly end. Bloodlines doesn’t reinvent that wheel, but does deliver with some clever and often surprising twists on who gets taken out and how. The film used trailers and marketing to its advantage, creating expectations and then undercutting them entirely in the actual film. If you are looking for that unique horror experience that only Final Destination can deliver, this is it (again).
That all said, directors Zach Lipovsky and Adam Stein, as well as screenwriters Guy Busick and Lori Evans Taylor, get lost in the weeds with this new conceptual premise for the series. Final Destination films have played with ensembles of characters with loose social connections (classmates, co-workers) and those who are seemingly strangers, but this is the first attempt to put a family in peril. That requires a lot of time spent exploring the individual family members and the conflicts between them, in order to make each potential death a significant loss; unfortunately, family drama isn’t what viewers want from a Final Destination movie. And, while the opening disaster sequence (the restaurant collapse) is one of the better ones the franchise has done, it eats up so much screen time that the movie never regains proper pacing. However, this is the final cameo appearance of franchise icon Tony Todd (Candyman), who gets both a powerful monologue moment, while his character finally gets an origin story… with a twist.
But let us know what you think after seeing it for yourself. Final Destination: Bloodlines will begin streaming on HBO Max on August 1st.
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Image courtesy of Focus Features.
