Final Destination 6, aka Bloodlines, ends on an incredibly brutal note, while leaving the page open should a seventh movie get the green light – and yes, there are plenty of grisly deaths along the way.
For the uninitiated, the Final Destination movies are all about cheating death. The horror franchise follows a prescribed formula: the protagonist will have a vision of a horrifying mass casualty event and manage to save a handful of unlucky souls by freaking out just in time.
But death doesn’t like being skipped. One by one, the survivors are hunted down by an invisible force, getting killed in the most elaborate, Rube Goldberg-esque ways imaginable. Bloodlines, which arrived in UK cinemas on May 14 – 14 years after the last film – follows a similar premise.
However, the new movie also shakes things up. This time, college student Stefani has a premonition of a deadly accident avoided by her grandma decades before, linking their fates with previous events. Warning: spoilers ahead!
Final Destination: Bloodlines ending explained
In the final scene, Stefani and her brother Charlie celebrate his graduation, believing they’ve cheated death. However, they find out that their ploy didn’t work due to a technicality. By this point, it’s too late – a massive train derails and runs onto their street, killing them both.
Prior to this, Stefani learns that her grandmother Iris had the first premonition in 1968, witnessing a deadly opening night at the Skyview Restaurant Tower. She managed to save everyone from death’s design – including a young William Bludworth (Tony Todd).
But as we know, death doesn’t let things slide. Instead, it started picking off the survivors – and eventually, their descendants – one by one, viewing their continued existence as a cosmic glitch.
Over the years, Iris tried to outsmart death by documenting every omen and pattern she noticed. She put all of her findings into a book, using it to prolong her family’s lives.
The issue is, no one believed her. Living in fear messed up Iris’ daughter Darlene (Stefani and Charlie’s mother) and her son Howard. As such, when Stefani asks her family for Iris’ contact details, they’re reluctant to give them to her.
With a little help from Howard’s wife Brenda, she is able to find her grandmother locked away in a maximum-security cabin in the woods. Iris tries teaching Stefani about death’s design, and when she doesn’t believe her, she decides to show her instead.
Iris steps outside of the house and death wastes no time in killing her off – a chain reaction leads to her being impaled through the mouth, right in front of Stefani.
The rest of Final Destination: Bloodlines involves Stefani trying to save her living biological family from suffering the same fate. Eventually, Stefani, Charlie, and their cousins meet up with the William Bludworth after discovering his link to the curse.
He tells them that there’s only two ways to cheat death: either killing someone else or dying and being brought back to life. Since they don’t want to go around murdering an innocent person, they decide their best bet is to bring one of their own back from the dead.
A lot of chaos ensues as they attempt to enact the plan – including plenty of deaths – which culminates in Stefani, Charlie, and their mother Darlene heading to Iris’ cabin. While there, another catastrophic chain of events unfolds, with Stefani ending up trapped in their RV underwater.
Darlene saves Charlie and urges him to help Stefani, sacrificing herself in the process (she’s killed by a falling lamp post). Charlie is able to cut Stefani’s seatbelt, but by the time he takes her out of the water, she’s unconscious.
He performs CPR and is able to save her, seemingly bringing her back to life and therefore breaking death’s curse. But at the very end of Final Destination: Bloodlines, they learn a horrifying truth.
After a series of sinister clues, Charlie introduces Stefani to his girlfriend Jenny’s father, a doctor. She sings her brother’s praises, saying, “He brought me back from the dead.” But the father points out, “Well, technically you weren’t dead. I mean, if you were unconscious and Charlie got you breathing again then your heart didn’t stop… regardless, way to go Charlie.”
Charlie and Stefani realize they were wrong – they didn’t stop death after all. Moments later, a train derails, breaking out onto their street and causing a trail of destruction. As a callback to Final Destination 2, the siblings are killed by logs that break free from the train’s cargo.
Who dies in Bloodlines?
There are eight deaths in Final Destination: Bloodlines, including Stefani and Charlie right at the end. This obviously isn’t counting the Skyview Restaurant Tower disaster premonition at the start. So, the kills shown on screen are:
- Iris
- Howard
- Julia
- Erik
- Bobby
- Darlene
- Charlie
- Stefani
Due to the bloodline curse, only the Campbell family are targeted – except for Erik, who gets caught in the crossfire. You see, he’s Bobby’s brother and the son of Howard (Iris’ son) and Brenda.
As such, earlier on in the horror movie, Stefani believes Erik is the next target. And in a particularly grisly scene, his nose piercing gets stuck on a chain, which itself gets stuck on a ceiling fan. He gets dragged up by his nose and spun around as a fire breaks out at his place of work: a tattoo parlor.
However, he survives the incident. When relaying this information to his family, Brenda reveals a family secret – he’s not the biological son of Howard after all, and instead the result of a previous relationship.
This spares him from the curse… until later. But first, let’s talk about Howard’s death. You may have seen this teased in the Final Destination: Bloodlines trailer. After a chain reaction kicks off at a family barbecue, poor Howard steps on a stray shard of glass and falls to the floor.
A nearby lawn mower is activated and heads straight for him, shredding his face and killing him. Then there’s his daughter Julia, who is hit in the head by a football, pushing her into a trash can. This is lifted by a rubbish removal truck, chucking Julia in the back where she gets crushed to death.
Now, for Erik and Bobby. After learning about Bludworth’s cheat sheet, they decide the best way to carry out the plan is to give Bobby some peanuts, to which he’s deathly allergic.
This takes place at a hospital, so all they have to do is wait for him to die temporarily and then revive him with an adrenaline shot. However, death is one step ahead of them.
While enacting their plan, they accidentally lock themselves in an MRI room and activate the machine, which continues to rise without them noticing. For the uninitiated, MRI scanners contain powerful magnets, hence why you need to remove any jewelry before entering the room – and anyone with metal in their bodies can’t use them.
Soon enough, the machine rips Erik’s piercings from his body – including one on his nether regions – before sucking in the wheelchair behind him, crushing Erik to death. Finally, a metal spring from a nearby vending machine flies through, killing Bobby.
Will there be a Final Destination 7?
Warner Bros. has yet to give Final Destination 7 the green light, but that’s not to say it can’t happen. Thanks to the Bloodlines ending, the death curse’s diary is wide open, meaning the story could very well continue.
A lot of this decision will be based on box office performance. Although the budget hasn’t been revealed, reports estimate it to be around the $40 million mark, in which case it’ll need to make around $100 million at the box office to be considered a success.
This is due to movies generally needing to make approximately 2.5 times their original budget to break even due to the additional costs such as fees to exhibitors, merchandising, and taxes.
The margin might not be quite as tight for a film of this kind compared to, say, MCU movies, which tend to spend more on marketing.
Opening weekend box office predictions vary, but Box Office Pro puts its domestic estimations between $35 million and $50 million, boosted by its IMAX release and positive reviews (it’s received a 92% Rotten Tomatoes score at the time of writing).
For now, we’ll just have to wait and see how it performs, and whether this means fate has a Final Destination 7 in store for our future.
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