Final Destination Bloodlines Ties the Entire Franchise Together in a Satisfying Way

Final Destination Bloodlines brings one of the best horror franchises back to theaters more than a decade after its last installment, giving fans the much-anticipated creative kills the series is famous for. Directors Zach Lipovsky and Adam Stein did their homework, as Final Destination Bloodlines has been met with raving reviews and is poised to become a box office hit. Curiously, the new movie dives deeper into the mythology than any previous installments, exploring how Death’s design works at length. More importantly, the credits sequence of Final Destination Bloodlines cleverly ties the whole franchise together, changing everything we knew about Death’s previous victims.

Warning: Spoilers below for Final Destination Bloodlines

Final Destination Bloodlines kicks off in 1968 with arguably the best premonition sequence of the entire franchise. In this opening scene, we follow Iris (Brec Bassinger) as she’s taken by her boyfriend, Paul (Max Lloyd-Jones), to the inaugural evening of a fancy panoramic view restaurant built on top of a tower. Of course, things go deliciously wrong and the tower becomes a crumbling death-trap, killing hundreds of people. Thanks to Iris’ vision, the patrons and staff of the Sky Tower survive, giving Death the extra trouble of tracking down dozens of people.

[RELATED: Final Destination Bloodlines’ Sequel Chances Get a Disappointing Update From Horror Directors]

Given the sheer number of survivors from the Sky Tower accident and Death’s obsessive-compulsive tendencies, it takes years to make things right and prepare all the elaborate accidents we love so much. That means some of the survivors had the time to have children, or even grandchildren, who were also not supposed to exist according to Death’s design. All these new people get added to Death’s list, creating a specific workflow that wipes each bloodline in order, from the eldest members of the family to the youngest. This clever twist in the franchise’s formula ultimately explains why every other movie happened.

How Final Destination Bloodlines Explains the Plot of the Entire Franchise

While Iris’ premonition takes place in the late 1960s, the movie’s main events are set in the present day, as Iris’ granddaughter Stefani (Kaitlyn Santa Juana) starts to have horrible nightmares about the Sky Tower accident. During her investigations, Stefani finds out her estranged grandmother (Gabrielle Rose) is still alive, living alone in a cabin in the woods to keep her safe from Death’s designs. Over the decades, Iris has documented the deaths of all the Sky Tower’s survivors and compiled a big book filled with clues and newspaper articles, tracing the order in which Death disposed of the original survivors and their descendants.

Iris’ book becomes a key prop in Final Destination Bloodlines, as Stefani tries to use it to save her family once the matriarch finally dies. However, we never see more than a handful of pages filled with doodles and notes during the movie. During the credit sequence of Final Destination Bloodlines, we get a better glance at Iris’ collage of Death’s victims over the years, presented stylishly as the red tape the woman used to glue everything together guides fans through the timeline of events. To our surprise, the newspaper scraps Iris collected in her book describe the gruesome death we’ve witnessed in the previous Final Destination installments.

What the credits scene of Final Destination Bloodlines reveals is that the catastrophic events from previous movies were put together by Death to get rid of the descendants of the people who were supposed to die in the Sky Tower. That means all the major victims of Death’s design over the entire franchise have parents or grandparents who remained alive longer than they should because Iris had that very first premonition. That helps to explain why the survivors’ struggles to keep alive and cheat Death constantly fail, as they were on its list due to an event that happened decades earlier.

The credits scene also creates curious connections between all the leading survivors of the Final Destination franchise. They all have premonitions, like Iris, as if there’s a force trying to prevent cataclysmic events since 1968. We still don’t know why premonitions occur, but now we can be sure that everything can be traced back to the Sky Tower accident, which put everything into motion.

Final Destination Bloodlines is currently available in theaters.

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