Final Destination Bloodlines is now streaming on HBO Max, where it quickly shot to the top of the streamers trending titles list. After you watch, you’ll understand why its popular: This movie is pure, gross, silly, bloody, disgusting, fun.
Directed by Zach Lipovsky and Adam Stein, Final Destination Bloodlines is the sixth movie in the franchise and features an all-new cast of unlucky young adults who can’t outrun their destiny. Kaitlyn Santa Juana stars as Stefani Reyes, a college student who realizes that she and her family never should have existed, because their grandparents cheated death. The film also stars Teo Briones, Richard Harmon, Owen Patrick Joyner, Rya Kihlstedt, Anna Lore, Brec Bassinger, and Final Destination mainstay Tony Todd, in his last role before his death in November 2024.
Final Destination Bloodlines is mostly an excuse for a lot of clever, violent, Mouse Trap-esque deaths. But the movie also gets into the lore of how Death operates in this universe. If you got confused, don’t worry, Decider is here to help. Read on for a full analysis of the Final Destination Bloodlines plot summary and the Final Destination Bloodlines ending explained, including why Erik dies.
Warning: Major spoilers for Final Destination Bloodlines ahead, obviously.
The movie opens in 1969, when a young woman named Iris (Brec Bassinger) goes on a date with her loving boyfriend Paul (Max Lloyd-Jones), to the grand opening of the “Skyview” building, a tall, skinny tower that looks a lot like the Space Needle. A bad little boy throws a penny off the edge of the building, despite being told not to do so. The penny gets lodged in the tower’s ventilation system, triggering a series of unlikely events that causes the entire tower to explode and crash, killing everyone inside.
In the present day, it’s revealed that this was all a dream had by college student Stefani Reyes (Kaitlyn Santa Juana). Stefani has been plagued every night by this recurring nightmare about her grandparents dying in a tragic accident. She doesn’t know why, because she has looked up the real Skyview tower, and it never collapsed.
The dreams are ruining her sleep schedule and life, so Stefani goes home looking for answers. Her dad really doesn’t want to talk about her grandmother, but Stefani’s uncle Howard (Alex Zahara) explains that Grandma Iris was overprotective of her children to the point of being abusive, always convinced that “Death” was coming for them. That’s the reason Stefani’s mother Darlene ran away and abandoned her family.
With some help from Aunt Brenda (April Telek), Stefani finds out her grandmother Iris is still alive, and living in a remote, fortified cabin. Iris reveals that Stefani’s nightmare is actually a premonition that Iris had as a young woman. Because she had the premonition, Iris was able to stop the little boy from throwing that penny and saved everyone who was supposed to die that day. However, because she messed with Death’s grand plan, Death has been on the war path to kill everyone who was supposed to die in the tower, in the order they were supposed to die. And that includes all of those peoples’ descendants, because they were never supposed to exist in the first place.
But wait, there’s more. Iris has become an expert on outrunning death. That’s how she’s survived for so long, and, in turn, how she has protected all of her descendants for so long. (It’s Iris’s “turn” to die, so as long as she stays alive, Death won’t start coming for her family members.) She’s written everything she knows about how to avoid Death in a book. Unfortunately, Death found a way to come for Iris that she can’t avoid: cancer.
Stefani concludes her grandmother has lost her mind, and tries to leave. Desperate to prove that she is telling the truth, Iris gives Stefani her book of findings, and then steps outside to allow herself to die via a gruesome impaling death, to prove her point.
Stefani’s mom Darlene (Rya Kihlstedt) shows up for Grandma Iris’s funeral. Stefani is still very much pissed at her mom for abandoning the family. However, Stefani’s younger brother Charlie (Teo Briones) points out that Stefani also kinda abandoned the family when she left for college and stopped calling or visiting her family.
After the funeral, the family attends a wake/barbecue, where a series of complicated events leads to Stefani’s uncle Howard getting brutally killed via a freak lawnmower accident. After this, Stefani is ready to believe what her Grandma Iris said. She pours over the Death book that Iris gave her. But when she tries to warn the family that Death is coming for them, and that Howard’s oldest son Erik (Richard Harmon) is next in line to die, no one believes her. Erik certainly doesn’t believe her, even after he narrowly escapes death after an accident at his tattoo parlor job.
Then something really strange happens: Erik’s younger sister Julia (Anna Lore) dies a terrible death via a trash compactor, in the exact same manner that Stefani predicted Erik might die. Clearly, Stefani has learned how to know when Death is coming like her grandmother, though it’s not clear why Death skipped over Erik and went to Julia. That matter is cleared up by Julia and Erik’s mom: Erik was a child born out of an affair with a different man, and Howard was not his biological father. Therefore, Erik is not part of Iris’s bloodline.
Next in the order to die is Erik’s youngest brother, Bobby (Owen Patrick Joyner). Now that everyone believes her, Erik and Stefani’s brother Charlie decide to help her find someone mentioned in the Death book who found a way to defeat death, who goes by “JB.” They track JB down at the local hospital, where he is revealed to be William John Bludworth; aka the late, great, Tony Todd; aka the guy that has been in every Final Destination movie. When William was just a kid, he was in the tower with Iris, and he was the last one to die in Iris’s premonition. That means that once Iris’s entire bloodline has been taken by Death, Death will come for William.
Because William just knows a lot about this whole Death thing, he explains to Stefani there are two ways she can escape her fate: 1) Sacrifice someone else who is not meant to die, and steal the time they have left. 2) Trick death by clinically dying, and then getting revived and brought back to life.
Erik talks his brother Bobby into trying the revival trick. Bobby has a deadly peanut allergy, so he will deliberately eat peanuts, die, and then be brought back to life by Erik. But the plan goes awry, and leads to Erik dying a gruesome death via MRI machine, and Bobby also dying a gruesome death via a coil through the head. Next up in the Death order: Darlene, aka Stefani’s mom.
Darlene decides to go live in Iris’s fortified cabin for the remainder of her life, in the hope that she can stay alive long enough to give her kids’ a semblance of a normal life. But first, she has to get there.
Stefani and Charlie accompany Darlene to the cabin, hoping to protect her from Death long enough to get Darlene inside. But they don’t succeed. The RV they are driving crashes, gets submerged in water, and Stefani’s seatbelt jams. She’s drowning! Meanwhile, Charlie is crushed by rubble and saved by his mom… but in the process, mom gets violently killed by a falling lamp post. Now it’s Stefani’s turn to die.
Stefani seemingly does die, via drowning, but Charlie brings her back with CPR. Woo-hoo! They successfully tricked Death, and now can live their life in peace. It’s over.
…Or so they think. A week later, Stefani helps Charlie get ready for prom, and meets the father of his date, who is a doctor. The doctor informs Stefani that while it’s great Charlie saved her, she was not actually clinically dead, because her heart didn’t stop. It’s not clear how he would know that, but nevertheless, it seems he is right.
While all this is going on, another unlucky penny causes a major train derailment, leading a train to crash right through the suburban street where Stefani and Charlie are. Even though they outrun the train, a wayward logging truck also crashes, causing logs to crash into Stefani and Charlie, killing them instantly. This is, of course, a reference to the beloved opening disaster sequence of Final Destination 2, involving a huge highway accident with a logging truck.
With that, the movie ends. During the credits, we see news articles about all the various freak accidents that Death orchestrated to claim the other people in the tower—and their descendants—who were never supposed to live.
If Erik isn’t part of the bloodline, why does he still die a horrible death? Well, according to writers Zach Lipovsky and Adam Stein in an interview with Polygon, it’s because Erik was trying to mess with Death’s plan by trying to save Bobby. Death doesn’t like it when people meddle!
“Tony says it: when you fuck with Death, things get messy,” Stein told Polygon.
“That’s right,” Lipovsky added. “That was our answer to that question. Right after [Erik] dies, that’s the first line — ‘Why did he die?’ And Kaitlyn’s character [echoes Bludworth]: ‘When you fuck with Death, things get messy.’ I think that’s a very good lesson for everyone to remember.”
Stein went on to provide an explanation for Erik’s near-brush with death in the tattoo parlor, too, saying, “The other big question is, why does Death hook Erik in the tattoo parlor, when he’s not next?” he says. “We always liked the idea that Death has a sense of playfulness. Just like a fisherman might catch a fish without intending to kill it, and they’ll hook the fish and then throw ’em back, that’s exactly what death is doing with Eric in that tattoo parlor scene.”