CEBU, Philippines - In the first film, the original plan was to have Death as a much more obvious entity, as illustrated when the character Tod sees a shadow in the mirror and the water running back into the toilet to “cover its tracks.” Subsequently, it was decided to have the deaths appear simply as accidents.
Death foreshadowed: During the opening credits of the first film, a hanging doll, a guillotine and a picture of a knife in someone’s chest foreshadow what will soon befall the characters. One character is shadowed by a dagger in the first film, while in the second film, a character’s face fades into the outline of a skull, and yet another character unwisely ignores warnings about his eye. In Final Destination 3, two characters hear the song “Love Rollercoaster,” which refers to the rollercoaster that should have killed them.
In order to film the massive pileup sequence in Final Destination 2, several miles of highway had to be closed down for several days.
In Final Destination 3, the cast members on the rollercoaster had to ride the coaster 26 times on the same night in order to shoot the film’s main premonition scene.
Tony Todd, who plays Bludworth in the first, second and fifth films, provides the voice of the devil above the entrance to the roller coaster in Final Destination 3. In that third film, he also provides the speaker’s voice saying, “This is the end of the line” in the subway.
The opening titles of The Final Destination (the fourth in the series) recreate death scenes from all three of the previous films. The fourth film holds the distinction of containing 11 “kills,” the most of any film in the series.
In The Final Destination, when he is hit by the bus, the character George is in the middle of stating, “My wife said that Deja Vu is like God’s way of...” and then he’s cut off by the impact. Some viewers wonder what the end of his sentence was going to be. The answer is that of a common expression “...telling you that you are in the right place at the right time,” hence the irony of the situation.
(Opening across the Philippines on Aug. 24 in 3D and regular format, “Final Destination 5” is distributed worldwide by Warner Bros. Pictures, a Warner Bros. Entertainment Company.)