This year will see the release of Final Destination: Bloodlines, the sixth film in the franchise, and the first one in over a decade. The anxiety-inducing Rube Goldberg deaths the series is known for have become legendary among horror movie fans, but behind the gory deaths and tense setpieces lies a creative regret that still haunts the franchise’s creators.
Jeffrey Reddick, the original screenwriter of Final Destination, recently opened up about one pivotal misstep that altered the trajectory of the series: the abrupt, off-screen demise of Devon Sawa’s Alex Browning in Final Destination 2. Considering how pivotal Alex was for the plot in the first film, every fan believed (including Reddick) that he would become the face of the series, only for Clear (Ali Larter) to confirm he died between the first two films.
Reddick has long argued that Alex had the potential to break the mold of horror tropes by becoming a rare “Final Guy”: a male counterpart to the iconic “Final Girl” survivors like Halloween’s Laurie Strode or Scream’s Sidney Prescott. Sawa’s character was a grounded, relatable protagonist whose paranoia-fueled ingenuity helped him cheat Death not once, but twice. To hear that he died from a brick to the head is just anticlimactic, to say the least.
“I never planned on killing Alex,” Reddick told Sergio Pereira on Thought Catalog. According to the screenwriter, he saw potential in Alex becoming the series’ lead “Final Guy,” even though he had already decided Clear had to die in the first Final Destination sequel.
One thing that seems rather odd about Alex’s demise is how unceremonious it feels, even for a franchise like Final Destination. The fact that he just dies from a falling brick sounds completely out of the blue, and yet, it makes perfect sense within the franchise’s set of rules. No matter how much you run, you simply can’t escape Death – not even if you’re the series’ “Final Guy”. I mean, the same thing happened to Alice in Friday the 13th Part 2.
That being said, Reddick mentions a rule that any movie fan knows by heart: “In a horror movie, if you don’t see a character die on screen, to me, they’re not dead.” He mentions that the picture Clear (known as Kimberly in Reddick’s original draft) shows of Alex’s dead body, but that’s it. We never get a clear look at his face, and, for all we know, it could have been someone else dead with that brick on their head.
Still, as far as the canon lore of Final Destination goes, Alex is dead and gone. Reddick explains that Final Destination: Bloodlines will expand the franchise in some unexpected ways, and that he would “Love to see [Alex] come back.” With the promise of more deadly shenanigans, the possibility of a new continuity, and the privilege of seeing one of Tony Todd’s final performances, Final Destination Bloodlines is shaping up to be a wild ride that honors the franchise’s deadly legacy.
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