In the ‘Final Destination’ Movies, Vancouver Is a Star

[Editor’s note: Sam Wiebe is an award-winning crime-fiction author based in New Westminster, B.C. He is also a movie expert. His latest book traces the rise of Vancouver as Hollywood North, the third-busiest film production hub on the continent. ‘Shot in Vancouver: Adventures in Hollywood North’ details the many contributions Vancouver has made to the film industry across decades. It’s also an affectionate tribute to a city in disguise. In the following excerpt, Wiebe considers the role of the city in the ‘Final Destination’ series, a suite of horror films shot in Vancouver.]

The teen horror franchise Final Destination has more in common with The X-Files than with Freddy and Jason. Instead of a recognizable monster, Death itself pursues the characters, operating through ordinary objects. A tanning bed, an MRI machine, even a cup of tea become Rube Goldberg-like death traps. We know Death is coming for the characters, but not how or when.

Five of the six Final Destination films were shot in Vancouver. The franchise featured the late Tony Todd, whose final screen performance adds poignance to the sixth film.

From crashing planes at Vancouver International Airport (YVR) to levelling the Lions Gate Bridge, no film series has made better (or gorier) use of Lower Mainland locations.

The Final Destination formula begins with a premonition — an airplane crash, a traffic pileup, a roller coaster that derails. The accident is foreseen by a young person who manages to convince others to steer clear of impending doom.

Yet when the survivors start to perish in seemingly random accidents, the teens realize that Death is looking to balance the books. After consulting a mysterious figure (in four of the films, it’s a mortuary worker named Bludworth), they try to outrun their own mortality.

Originally titled Flight 180, Final Destination (2000) began as a treatment by novice screenwriter Jeffrey Reddick.

A nervous flyer, Reddick sketched out an idea about a premonition of a plane crash.

“So the project was originally an X-Files spec script,” Reddick told Fangoria, “but before I even got it over there I had a couple of friends read it, and they said, ‘This is a really good idea, you may want to try to stretch it out into a feature.’”

Reddick’s idea was developed by James Wong and Glen Morgan. Friends since childhood, Wong and Morgan had worked on the series 21 Jump Street and The Commish before making their mark as part of the writing staff of The X-Files. They enlisted special effects supervisor Terry Sonderhoff, production designer John Willett, and director of photography Robert McLachlan, who’d worked with Wong and Morgan on Millennium.

Devon Sawa saves the day

Vancouver actor Devon Sawa would play Alex, the teen whose premonition saves several classmates from a fatal flight.

Sawa, who’d appeared on KidZone and The Odyssey, read the script under the worst (or best) circumstances: on a plane. “I found myself looking out the window every five minutes at the engines,” he told the Times Colonist.

Candyman’s Tony Todd portrayed Bludworth, a mortuary worker who seems to know more about the operations of death than he lets on.

“I never set out to be a horror guy,” Todd told AMFM Magazine. “But the genre found me, and I found a home in it.”

Ali Larter and Seann William Scott played the other teen survivors, and Kristen Cloke portrayed their teacher. Wong and Morgan named the characters (Lewton, Shreck, Murnau, Browning, Hitchcock) after stars and directors from old horror films. “They’re basically horror movie fans making horror movies,” makeup artist Ryan Nicholson told Fangoria.

Nicholson’s Burnaby-based Flesh and Fantasy studio created many of the gruesome deaths in the film, including a decapitation. Victoria-born Nicholson designed corpses for Da Vinci’s Inquest and effects for Deadpool 2 and also directed his own independent horror films, including Live Feed, before he died of a brain tumour in 2019.

Filming locations for Final Destination included YVR, the Granville Street Bridge, and several local homes to stand in for Mt. Abraham, New York.

A BC Transit bus is involved in one of the deaths.

After a test screening, reshoots were done in Victoria using Bastion Square and Garrick’s Head Pub to represent a Paris café.

‘What is life about? What is death about?’

Final Destination grossed $175 million, and a sequel was almost immediately green-lit, this time directed by David R. Ellis.

In Final Destination 2 (2003), Kimberly (A.J. Cook) foresees a multi-vehicle crash on a stretch of highway (filmed near Abbotsford).

Riverview Hospital and Buntzen Lake appeared, as did Andrew Airlie as Kimberly’s dad and Veena Sood as an ER nurse. Tony Todd and Ali Larter reprised their roles from the first film.

Final Destination 3 (2006) brought back Wong and Morgan to direct and co-write. This time, Wendy (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) saves classmates from a horrific derailment of the Devil’s Flight roller coaster (Playland’s Corkscrew). Though Bludworth doesn’t appear in the film, Tony Todd voices the electronic greeting at the roller coaster’s entrance.

Final Destination 5 (2011) — the fourth film, called The Final Destination, was shot in New Orleans — also starts in a familiar Vancouver location, this time the Lions Gate Bridge, which crumbles and collapses, nearly killing Sam (Nicholas D’Agosto) and his co-workers.

The demolition was created by Vancouver VFX studio Prime Focus using software developed by Victoria’s Cebas Visual Technology to simulate collision physics and flying debris.

The sixth film in the franchise, Final Destination: Bloodlines (2025), begins in 1969 with the collapse of a revolving restaurant (a CGI tower sprouting from the H.R. MacMillan Space Centre).

Stefani (Kaitlyn Santa Juana), the granddaughter of the crash’s survivor, is haunted by visions of the collapse and tries to stop Death from picking off all the members of her family.

Bloodlines marked not only Bludworth’s last appearance in the series, but also Tony Todd’s final role — the actor died of cancer in November 2024. Directors Zach Lipovsky and Adam B. Stein encouraged Todd to rewrite and improvise his scene to express his own thoughts on mortality.

As Stein related to USA Today, “We asked Tony to put aside the script and just speak from the heart about what all this is about. What is life about? What is death about? What do you want the fans to come away with when they watch Final Destination? And the take that’s in the film is him speaking from the heart, speaking right to the fans.”

Although he was physically weakened by his illness, Todd told the filmmakers, “Do not write me out of this movie.”

In his character’s improvised exit, he says, “I intend to enjoy the time I have left. And I suggest you do the same. Life is precious. Enjoy every single second. You never know when … Good luck.”

It’s fitting that the Final Destination series was born out of an X-Files spec script, as it aims for the same blend of horror, humour, and poignancy that the series features. Mundane objects become terrorizing weapons.

“Death, like life, is literally all around you — and it’s a matter of taking one step in the wrong direction,” Wong told Fangoria.

“The greatest paranoia we can give the viewing public is to make them think, ‘If I do this, will it lead to my ultimate demise?’”

As Bludworth says in the original film, “In death, there are no accidents, no coincidences, no mishaps, and no escapes.”

Excerpt from ‘Shot in Vancouver: Adventures in Hollywood North’ by Sam Wiebe, (2026), with permission from Arsenal Pulp Press.