‘Final Destination Bloodlines' Opening Was Originally Set On Riverboat, Directors Say

Forbes

20-05-2025

Partial "Final Destination Bloodlines" poster.
The hit horror film Final Destination Bloodlines opens with the terrifying Skyview scene, but that dizzying sequence wasn't there when the film's directors, Zach Lipovsky and Adam Stein, started working on the film.
Instead, the directors said, the original scene in the screenplay was not set 500 feet above ground in a tower in the sky, but in a boat on the water.
Final Destination Bloodlines opened at No. 1 at the box office over the weekend with $51.6 million in domestic ticket sales and $54.1 million for a worldwide tally of $105.7 worldwide, making it the biggest opening in the six-film Final Destination franchise that began in 2000.
The horrific Skyview sequence — set atop a Seattle Space Needle-like structure in 1968 — originates as a recurring nightmare that college student Stefanie (Kaitlyn Santa Juana) keeps having at the beginning of Final Destination Bloodlines. After a Rube Goldberg-like chain reaction leads to explosions and a breakdown in the structure, everyone in the Skyview restaurant either falls to their death or burn alive in the tower.
As it turns out, however, the nightmare is a premonition of Stefanie's future grandmother, Iris (Bech Bassinger) had in 1968 in the Skyview, and in turn, everybody rushed out of the tower and survived. But death in the Final Destination movies has a way of coming for those who cheat their fate, and in this case, the grim reaper wants the survivors of the Skyview disaster and their blood relatives.
In a Zoom conversation with Lipovsky and Stein before the release of Final Destination Bloodlines last week, the directors said the Skyview opening was a scene they helped build with the screenwriters and other talent to set the stage for the horror thriller.
'The draft of the script that we read and based our pitch around didn't even have that same opening sequence,' Stein explained. 'It had a completely different opening sequence that took place on a paddle wheel riverboat. So, we pitched a bunch of ideas for that sequence.'
At the same time, Stein added, he and Lipovsky weren't afraid to tell the production that the riverboat idea had some choppy waters to navigate.
'We also mentioned our reservations about that direction, because as soon as we started going down the road of thinking about ideas and how to do a major disaster on a boat, you run into Titanic,' Stein recalled. 'But you're never going to have the budget to do what Titanic did. [We thought], 'You're never going to make a better disaster than Titanic, so you might want to think about other ideas.''
While Stein and Lipovsky were pushing back on the original riverboat idea, their candidness about the shortcomings of the script didn't rub the Final Destination Bloodlines producers the wrong way.
'I think one of the things that I think is really important in doing a successful pitch is to be very passionate to have lots of ideas, but then also be very candid about your reservations about the material because they want to know that you're gonna have lots of ideas of how to make it better than it already is,' Stein said.
Interestingly, there were a couple of other key scenes in the final version of Final Destination Bloodlines that weren't in the original script, either.
'There wasn't a tattoo parlor scene and there wasn't a backyard barbecue scene,' Stein said. 'It was a very different movie when we first got involved.'
HOLLYWOOD, CALIFORNIA - MAY 12: (L-R) Adam Stein and Zach Lipovsky attend the World Premiere of ... More Warner Bros "Final Destination Bloodlines" at TCL Chinese Theatre on May 12, 2025 in Hollywood, California. (Photo by Rodin Eckenroth/FilmMagic)
Zach Lipovsky and Adam Stein — who beat out around 200 other directors vying to helm Final Destination Bloodlines by staging a fake decapitation scene during a Zoom meeting with studio reps — said working on the film presented them with a decidedly different process than their 2018 indie horror film sensation, Freaks.
Ultimately, it was an environment where the filmmakers said they thrived as new ideas were brought to the table.
'It's a many, many-year process that involves hundreds of people collaborating,' Lipovsky explained. 'It starts with all the producers and writers in the studio as we're working on ideas, but then very quickly, you start hiring crew.
'You're continuously iterating and having huge meetings with all the different key department heads and artists that are going to work on the film, and then you're also budgeting everything and going, 'Oh wait, well, we can't do that. So, we have to do this instead,'' Lipovsky added. 'It's this massive, evolving machine that can take many years to get all the pieces in place.'
Brec Bassinger in "Final Destination Bloodlines."
Stein said one of the first things he and Lipovsky did after they were hired was participate in a huge collaborative session of writers to bounce ideas off each other.
'They got a writer's room together with a bunch of talented horror writers from around the industry to just brainstorm [with questions like], 'What are other locations we could exploit? What are other fears we could exploit? Lots of ideas came out of that,' he said.
After that, Lipovsky and Stein, as well as the film's writers and producers, had a 'roundtable summit' at Final Destination franchise producer Craig Perry's house to construct what became Final Destination Bloodlines.
'We went through all the ideas that were on the table and we basically started shaping the version of the movie that became what it is now,' Stein said. 'The Skyview idea came out of that conversation. Basically, we said, 'Well, if we're not going to do a boat [disaster], what else could we do? What are other fears we could exploit?' And that's where the fear of heights came in.'
Final Destination Bloodlines, featuring a screenplay written by Guy Busick & Lori Evans Taylor that is based on a story by Jon Watts and Busick & Evans Taylor, is playing in theaters worldwide.