Final Destination 3

McKinley High School seniors celebrate graduation night at an amusement park in Pennsylvania. Wendy Christensen takes digital pictures all night. In one shot of the High Dive ride, a burned-out V bulb makes the sign read High Die. She is there with her boyfriend Jason Wise, his best friend Kevin Fischer, and Kevin's girlfriend Carrie Dreyer, who is also Wendy's best friend. They board the Devil's Flight roller coaster. Also riding are best friends Ashley Freund and Ashlyn Halperin, athlete Lewis Romero, goth couple Ian McKinley and Erin Ulmer, and Frankie Cheeks, who graduated two years earlier. Without Wendy knowing, her younger sister Julie and Julie's friend Perry Malinowski are on the ride too.

As the ride starts, Wendy has a vision of the coaster derailing in a chain reaction and everyone on it dying. She panics, a fight breaks out, and Wendy, Kevin, Ian, Erin, Lewis, Ashley, Ashlyn and Frankie end up off the ride. Julie and Perry slip off in the commotion. Jason and Carrie stay on. The coaster derails for real and they both die.

Weeks later, Kevin tells Wendy about Flight 180 and how Death came after its survivors in the order they would have died. Wendy starts looking at her photos from the park and sees that each one seems to hint at how that person will die. She works out that the survivors are dying in the order they sat on the coaster.

Ashley and Ashlyn go to a tanning salon with big iced drinks. Condensation shorts out the controls, a coat rack knocks a loose shelf across the beds and traps them, and the beds overheat and burn them alive. Their photo was overexposed so they looked like they were on fire. Frankie is next. Wendy and Kevin are stuck in Kevin's truck at a drive-thru when a driverless truck rolls down a hill and crashes into it. The engine fan flies out and slices off the back of the head of the driver in front of them, who turns out to be Frankie. A second photo had shown a big fan behind his head.

The next day Lewis ignores their warning in the school gym, and the weights on his machine crash down and crush his head. His photo at the hammer game had cut his head out of the frame. At the hardware store where Ian and Erin work, Wendy saves Ian from falling wooden pickets, so Death skips to Erin. Sawdust blinds her and she falls back onto a nail gun, which fires nails into her head. Ian blames Wendy.

A photo shows Julie's charm bracelet on the coaster, and Wendy realizes her sister is on the list. At a tricentennial fair, a spooked horse drags Julie toward a harrow, and Kevin cuts her free. The horse then snaps a flagpole, which flies through Perry's chest. Wendy pulls Kevin away from a barbecue grill just before it explodes. Ian confronts Wendy, a cart of fireworks goes off, and a cherry picker collapses and cuts him in half. Since Wendy, Kevin and Julie were each skipped, they think they have beaten Death.

Five months later, Wendy rides a subway train with her friends Laura and Sean and runs into Julie and Kevin on board. A musician sings "Turn Around, Look at Me." Wendy has a vision of the train derailing and killing all three of them. When the signs start coming true, they try to stop the train, and the screen cuts to black as it crashes.

Story notes

• Wendy Christensen foresees the derailment of the Devil's Flight roller coaster and gets several classmates off the ride.
• Photographs taken before the accident appear to contain clues to the survivors' deaths.

Release facts

• Released: 2006-02-10 (premiere at Grauman's Chinese Theatre in early February 2006)
• Rated: R (for strong horror violence/gore, language and some nudity)

The film premiered at Grauman's Chinese Theatre in early February 2006 and opened wide February 10 in 2,880 theaters. It made $19,173,094 its first weekend, about $6,657 per theater, finishing second behind The Pink Panther. It dropped to fifth and then seventh, and after ten weekends it was down to 135 theaters. Box Office Mojo lists $54,098,051 domestic and $118,890,272 worldwide. It was the highest-grossing film in the series until The Final Destination passed it in 2009.

Rotten Tomatoes has it at 44% from 117 reviews, and Metacritic gives it 41 out of 100 from 28 critics. CinemaScore audiences gave it a B-plus.

Roger Ebert said the problem was that it was clear to everyone who would die and in what order. The New York Times said it had neither the novelty of the first film nor the panache of the second. Chris Carle of IGN liked it and wrote that the formula had been perfected, not worn out. James Berardinelli said it had more humor than the earlier films, and The Seattle Times liked the comic tone and deaths. The BBC said the real tragedy was that a promising young actress like Winstead had to go through it. Sarah Dobbs of Den of Geek later called it the high point of the series.

It was nominated at the 2006 Fangoria Chainsaw Awards for Most Thrilling Killing (Frankie's death), Highest Body Count, Line That Killed and Sickest FX. At the 2007 Saturn Awards it was nominated for Best Horror Film, and the Thrill Ride Edition DVD was nominated for Best DVD Special Edition Release.

Press and marketing

• Theatrical key-art / poster campaign reference: IMP Awards — Final Destination 3 poster archive.

Cast

Crew

Production

Development started soon after Final Destination 2 came out, and the producers always meant this one to stand alone with new characters. Jeffrey Reddick did not return. James Wong and Glen Morgan came back to write, with Wong directing. Wong said the roller coaster idea came from New Line executive Richard Brener and was not based on the 2003 Big Thunder Mountain Railroad accident at Disneyland. Wong said they wanted to show that Death could come for anyone. The working title was Cheating Death: Final Destination 3.

The filmmakers planned at first to make it in 3D. Morgan said they dropped the idea over cost and because red and blue glasses would make fire and blood hard to see. JoBlo's set report quotes a cost of about $15,000 per screen across 3,000 screens.

Mary Elizabeth Winstead and Ryan Merriman, who had both been in The Ring Two, were cast as Wendy and Kevin on March 21, 2005. Kris Lemche and Alexz Johnson were cast as Ian and Erin on April 9. Winstead had auditioned for Final Destination 2. Wong said he first pictured Wendy as a perky blonde and reworked the part after casting Winstead, who he said brought a kind of soulfulness to it. Johnson first read for Julie, and Amanda Crew first read for Erin before the two swapped.

Filming in Vancouver took three months and wrapped in July 2005. The first two weeks were spent on the roller coaster. Playland's Corkscrew coaster played Devil's Flight and was made much bigger with digital effects. JoBlo's set report says the first hill was raised to about 200 feet and a huge loop was added. The team held about ten six-hour planning meetings for the sequence, and grips tested camera mounts made of Styrofoam to see where they would break. The actors also wore helmet cams, and a rig kept the horizon line steady. About two weeks of green screen work on hydraulic rigs followed.

Wong said Tony Todd was left off screen on purpose, to see if the series could keep going with all new characters. After filming, they brought him in as the voice of the Devil statue and the subway announcer.

Wong said the original ending was too abrupt and had no closure. Wong pitched a subway ending, and Craig Perry pitched one that brought back the Final Destination 2 survivors. In one version of the subway scene, A.J. Cook and Michael Landes would have overheard Wendy and Kevin, but their schedules did not work out. New Line paid for the new ending, which was shot in November 2005.

New Line also paid to shoot new material for the Choose Their Fate DVD mode. Variety reported that Wong wrote 25 new script pages and that the studio put the added cost at $700,000 to $1 million.

James Wong identifies Richard Brener’s roller-coaster suggestion and the use of digital photographs as clues as the ideas that drew him back to the series.

During the set visit, Glen Morgan described testing proposed coaster camera mounts with Styrofoam models to find clearance problems before fitting cameras.

Craig Perry described planned horizon-stabilized and helmet-mounted views that would show both the ride and the actors reacting to one another.

Meteor Studios built 18 digital doubles from a shared base model fitted to actor scans. Their movements were animated by hand rather than captured from performers.

For coaster plates, camera motion was planned as the inverse of the cars’ movement; the on-set team reproduced those moves around stationary cars.

The subway finale combined Michael Joyce’s Cinema Production Services miniatures with 45 augmentation shots. Meteor completed its work on that sequence in six weeks.

Digital Dimension handled more than 100 effects shots for the individual death sequences, excluding the tanning-bed sequence.

Filming locations

• Playland Amusement Park, 2901 East Hastings Street, Vancouver: Amusement park; the Corkscrew coaster played Devil's Flight
• Vancouver College, 5401 Hudson Street, Vancouver: McKinley High School
• 657 East 15th Avenue, Vancouver: Tanning salon
• 131 12th Street, New Westminster, British Columbia: Drive-thru, built as a facade on the Queens Avenue side of an existing building
• Thunderbird Stadium, 6288 Stadium Road, Vancouver: Stadium scenes
• Burnaby City Hall, 4949 Canada Way, Burnaby: Police station
• Capilano View Cemetery, 1490 3rd Street, West Vancouver: Funeral and cemetery
• Vancouver's Playland amusement park supplied the Corkscrew roller coaster used as Devil's Flight.

Effects and makeup

About 340 visual effects shots were done for the film, and 144 of them were in the coaster crash. Meteor Studios did that sequence. Actors were filmed on green screen in single or linked cars on rigs and bungee cords, and the camera moves were planned as the reverse of the cars' movement so the crew could move cameras around cars that stayed still.

Meteor built 18 digital doubles from one base model fitted to scans of the actors. Their movement was animated by hand instead of motion capture.

Soho VFX did about 35 shots for the tanning bed deaths, mixing digital skin, glass, fire and smoke with real fire and smoke. Wong said the tanning beds were not actually hot on set, but the actresses' reactions made him squirm, and he felt for them because they were so exposed.

Digital Dimension handled more than 100 shots for the other deaths. Ian's death under the cherry picker was one of the hardest. Wong wanted more punch than the first version, so they ran several simulations of a digital body being crushed, Wong picked one, and Lemche reshot his part to match it.

The subway ending combined miniatures from Michael Joyce's Cinema Production Services with 45 digital shots. Meteor had six weeks to finish that sequence, and the crew said Wong asked for 30 percent more blood.

The roller-coaster disaster combined custom-built coaster cars and practical suspended elements with green-screen performers and extensive digital environments.

The opening disaster required approximately 144 visual-effects shots.

Individual death sequences mixed practical plates with CG doubles and digital body work where the physical gag could not safely be completed in camera.

Wong recalls that the tanning-bed set was not physically hot; the performers’ reactions supplied the impression of rising heat.

The filmmakers planned a combination of real coaster photography, hydraulic green-screen rigs and computer-generated destruction for the opening disaster.

Props and costumes

Gregory Mah designed the costumes. The school team is the McKinley Sultans, and a cardboard sultan with swords in one of Wendy's park photos hints at the swords in Lewis's death.

A Ward's Auctions sale in October 2020 included Erin Ulmer's funeral outfit worn by Alexz Johnson.

Wendy's digital camera and the prints she makes from it drive the whole plot. The High Dive sign with a dead V bulb gives the first clue.

Gregory Mah designed the film's costumes, including the McKinley High / Sultans school identity carried through Wendy Christensen's custom hooded jacket and T-shirt wardrobe and other student looks.

Surviving screen-used wardrobe and jewelry records include Wendy's custom Sultans outfit, Julie Christensen's charm bracelet and Carrie Dreyer's roller-coaster costume; separate auction records also document Erin Ulmer's funeral wardrobe. These items give the film unusually strong surviving costume provenance beyond the roller-coaster and death-effect rigs.

The amusement-park world also relied on a large graphic/prop package built around Devil's Flight, photo-booth imagery and fairground dressing, allowing the film's photo-clue mechanic to function as both story device and recurring production-design system.

Production artifacts

Art and design

• The IMP Awards primary one-sheet credits Vox and Associates for the poster design.

Scripts and documents

The killers

Deaths

The premonition

The disaster: Devil's Flight roller-coaster derailment

Death design

• Devil's Flight survivor order
• photo omen clues
• Choose Their Fate alternate-path mapping

Shirley Walker composed and conducted the score, performed by the Hollywood Studio Symphony. Scoring mixer Bobby Fernandez kept a gore-o-meter rating how violent each death scene was so the music would match.

This is the only film in the series without a commercial soundtrack album.

"Tribal Dance" by 2 Unlimited plays at the park as Wendy walks with Jason and Kevin dances.

Riders chant the Ramones' "Blitzkrieg Bop" as Ian argues with Lewis and Jason tries to get off the coaster.

"Love Rollercoaster" by Ohio Players plays in the tanning salon, and Ashley and Ashlyn sing along.

"Turn Around, Look at Me" by The Lettermen plays twice, including as Wendy and Kevin run from the driverless truck.

"Turn Around, Look at Me" is sung by Matt Ellis as a subway performer in the ending. Ellis's "ACF" is also credited.

"Love Train" performed by Tommy Lee, a cover of The O'Jays' 1972 song, plays over the end credits.

Also credited: "Queen of Apology" by The Sounds, "Hundred Grand" by Pete Atherton and "Killing Time" by (hed) Planet Earth, which someone in the gym is playing when Lewis dies.

Soundtrack releases

Home Media

• 2006 two-disc DVD from New Line Home Entertainment, released July 25, 2006, list price $29.98. It came in widescreen and full-screen versions, and the Thrill Ride Edition added Choose Their Fate. The widescreen disc is 2.35:1 anamorphic with Dolby Digital 5.1 and DTS 6.1. Disc one: commentary with James Wong, Glen Morgan and Robert McLachlan. Disc two: Kill Shot: Making Final Destination 3 (just under 90 minutes, viewable in parts), Dead Teenager Movie (24 minutes) on the genre, the animated short It's All Around You (7 minutes), the Severed Piece effects featurettes, an extended police station scene, trailers and TV spots. DVD sales came to about $18.9 million.
• A limited edition of the DVD sold only at Circuit City came with the Zenescope one-shot comic Final Destination: Sacrifice.
• 2011 Blu-ray from Warner Bros., released August 30, 2011. 1080p MPEG-4 AVC with Dolby TrueHD 5.1. Extras: commentary, It's All Around You (6:46), Dead Teenager Movie (24:39), Kill Shot (1:29:00), Severed Pieces (13:27), the extended police station scene (2:29), Planned Accidents (20:00), three TV spots and the trailer. Choose Their Fate was advertised on the box but is not on the disc.
• 2014 Final Destination Collection Blu-ray from Warner Bros., released October 28, 2014, with the first four films.
• 2022 Final Destination 5-Film Collection Blu-ray from Warner Bros. in Canada, released June 14, 2022.
• 2025 Final Destination 6-Film Collection on Blu-ray and DVD, released July 22, 2025.

Home video history

Store exclusives

• Final Destination 3 novelization by Christa Faust, Black Flame, January 2006, about a month before the film opened.
• Final Destination: Sacrifice, a 2006 Zenescope Entertainment one-shot comic packaged with a Circuit City-only edition of the Final Destination 3 DVD. It was later included in the trade paperback of Zenescope's five-issue series Final Destination: Spring Break.
• The poster design is credited to Vox and Associates on IMP Awards.
• 2006 Final Destination 3 movie promotional hat / cap documented in the collector market.

Books and publishing

The catalog

Trailers & clips

Gallery

Posters & Key Art

Film Stills

Behind the Scenes

Press & Promo