'So in many ways, Final Destination happened for all the right reasons. It says a lot that the team most known for their work on The X-Files gravitated towards a movie that began as an idea for the show.

'After nearly a year of trying to find someone, out of the blue, Morgan and Wong approached us and asked, 'We've never forgotten that idea, is it still available? Because now we are'. And everyone else we met with just wasn't the right fit. But when we were developing it with New Line, Scream came out and teenagers were hot again in horror, so they were like, 'Why don't we make them all teenagers?' And instead of Death taking over somebody and killing them, we had Death as this force that was killing them off.'Ĭraig Perry (producer): 'We were looking for a writer/director to give the movie an auteur feeling, but when we first approached Glen Morgan and James Wong, they weren't available. 'In the treatment, they were all adult characters that got off the plane, except for Alex, he was in his early 20s. 'The twist at the end was that there was a sheriff – who had helped them investigate the case – who had died in the line of duty at the same time the plane went down, so Death took over him and had him going out and cleaning up the mess, killing the people he had missed. In The X-Files script, it was Scully's brother that had the premonition that got them off the plane, and then the people who got off the plane were being murdered and he was the prime suspect. Jeffrey Reddick (creator): 'It changed a lot from the treatment. That's what New Line bought and that's what Jeffrey based his feature script on.' 'I responded very strongly to it, and when I got back to Los Angeles we sat down with Jeffrey to turn the outline into a full treatment.

He wrote the first draft of the script before Glen Morgan and James Wong came on board to work on another draft, with Wong directing.Ĭraig Perry (producer): 'I first heard of it when my old partner faxed a three-page outline of the feature idea to the hotel I was staying at for the weekend in San Francisco. Working with producers Craig Perry and Warren Zide, Reddick turned the idea into a 12-page feature treatment that New Line then bought.

Final Destination began life as a spec television script that Jeffrey Reddick wrote for an episode of The X-Files, but New Line saw the potential of its original idea as a feature film.

Final destination movies in order