15 Years Ago, Final Destination 5 Pulled Off the Best Twist Ending
Surprise prequel!
Inevitability is the grim theme of the Final Destination franchise. Death is coming for the protagonists, which means everybody in the audience more or less knows how things are going to end. What we don't know is how, exactly, the doomed will meet their elaborate gruesome ends. This is why Final Destination 5's ending is one of the best things the horror series has ever done. It's a twist that weaponizes the audience's belief that they've seen this all before by revealing that the fifth movie in the series is actually a secret prequel. (Spoiler warning for the end of Final Destination 5.)
Released on August 12, 2011, a decade and a half ago today, Final Destination 5 begins much like the four Final Destinations before it. There's a horrific accident; in this case the collapse of a bridge that Sam (Nicholas D'Agosto) and his co-workers would've been on had he not gotten a vision of all their deaths. But, as Tony Todd explains to them, they're still marked for death. The various kills are all pretty good — especially the spine-cracking gymnastics kill on uneven bars, perhaps the greatest death in the entire series. It's good but familiar stuff.
Eventually, Sam and his love interest Molly (Emma Bell) are some of the only survivors left and they think they're safe because they believe they've stolen some other people's lifespans. They decide to celebrate this new lease on life with a flight to Paris… only to find that there's a disturbance as they're boarding and a bunch of high school students get kicked off the plane. Suddenly, the audience's familiarity with Final Destination becomes a lot more immediate because we've seen this exact thing before. It's Alex Browning (Devon Sawa) and the rest of the characters from the first Final Destination movie. This whole time we've been watching a prequel, and we watch as Sam and Molly die when the plane explodes.
There are many examples of "stealth sequels," to the point where TV Tropes has an entire repository of them. The totally unexpected appearance of Bruce Willis at the end of Split confirming that the movie was a surprise sequel to Unbreakable is one of the best examples of a movie recontextualizing everything with a reveal. What Final Destination 5 does with its twist ending is a little different and harder to pull off. Jigsaw, the eighth movie in the Saw franchise, gets around the titular main villain having been dead for several movies by revealing that it's mostly been a prequel this whole time. The 2011 The Thing, though initially considered to be a remake of John Carpenter's classic, is in fact a prequel that shows what happened at the Norwegian research station before the start of the '80s movie. (The 2009 Star Trek movie is, technically, a surprise prequel, but that's due to time travel and alternate universe shenanigans so it's in a category of its own.)
Final Destination 5's timeline trickery is by far the best example of this seldom-used trope. It's impressive how well-executed the con is. At no point in the marketing of the film did Final Destination 5 tip its hat to secretly being Final Destination 0. In retrospect, there were clues that the movie was not set in the then-present day of 2011. Final Destination 5 doesn't draw too much attention to it, but the computers are older models and nobody has a smartphone. If you aren't looking for them, you'd be hard-pressed to find them because it's a completely fair assumption that this sequel is indeed a sequel.
Still, it is an absolute thrill to realize we've been had. Moreover, it's also a deliciously cruel twist because it suddenly recasts these protagonists we've been following the whole movie as mere sidenotes. Sam and Molly aren't survivors of the bridge collapse; they're just two casualties of the explosion of Flight 180. Prequels can often feel inherently a little unnecessary, like bonus homework before you get to the actual story. By revealing that Final Destination 5 has been a prequel, it reframes the movie as a nasty, clever joke rather than the fourth sequel.
Sam dies during the explosion of Flight 180 at the beginning of Final Destination 5/the start of Final Destination.
It would be more than a decade before Final Destination came back, and it's a testament to how great Final Destination 5's twist is that 2025's Final Destination Bloodlines played around in the past, too. The collapse of the observation tower that opens that movie takes place in 1969, making it chronologically the earliest event we've seen in the movies. William Bludworth, Tony Todd's character, reveals he has a connection to that event, explaining why he knows so much about Death's Design in all the other films. The Sky View disaster in Bloodlines is not the inciting incident for the entire franchise despite fan theories suggesting it is. The filmmakers confirmed in an interview that the disasters of the first five Final Destination were standalone incidents, otherwise every character marked for death in them would've had to have dead parents.
The ending of Final Destination 5 doesn't invite big questions of lore and theorizing. It's not that type of reveal. Instead it's brutally simple. There's no happy ending when what you've been watching is actually an unhappy beginning to another story.
