Jeffrey Reddick is an American screenwriter best known for creating The Final Destination franchise.
Youth
As a young child, he aspired to be a big horror film fan. One that marked a milestone in his film watching experience was A Nightmare on Elm Street. He was so impressed by the film, that he wrote a 12 page treatment for a sequel and sent it to New Line Cinema chairman, Robert Shaye; because Reddick did not have an agent at the time Shaye was unable to accept it, however this started what soon became a letter-phone partnership.
Final Destination
While working as an intern for New Line, he came up with the idea of what soon became Final Destination.
Final destination 2 was the last film Reddick worked on in the series
Originally written as a script submission for ongoing science fiction drama series The X-Files entitled 'Flight 180', the idea came to him on a plane flight. While reading from a newspaper, he came over an article of a woman who had a premonition of her daughter's plane crashing. She called her daughter and told her about her dream, concerned for her mother, the woman rescheduled her flight, and later that night, the plane did indeed crash.
His original conception of the series was that after the plane crash, Death would haunt the survivors in their dreams and haunted them with images of the fatalities of the crash, and other deceased loved ones, until the point where the would commit suicide, and in later drafts Death would possess someone in a state of brain-death in order to set the traps in motion. After the script was passed on to Glen Morgan and James Wong to turn into a film script however, it was soon changed to the Rube Goldberg-esque style that has become the series' staple, but Reddick "is still happy with the way they took it."
Reddick was involved in writing the sequel, Final Destination 2. This would be the final film he was directly involved in, however he was credited as creator in all five films.
On October 5, 2020, during an interview, Reddick confirms that the sixth film had been in the works prior to COVID-19 pandemic.
| Franchise |
|---|
| Final Destination movies |
| Final Destination | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | Bloodlines |
| Final Destination novels |
| Dead Reckoning | Destination Zero | End of the Line | Dead Man's Hand | Looks Could Kill | Death of the Senses | Wipeout (unpublished) | Final Destination | Final Destination 2 | Final Destination 3 |
| Final Destination comics |
| Sacrifice | Spring Break |
| People |
| Jeffrey Reddick | James Wong | Glen Morgan | Warren Zide | Craig Perry | Toby Emmerich | Shirley Walker | David R. Ellis | J. Mackye Gruber | Eric Bress | Brian Tyler | Steven Quale | Eric Heisserer |
| Distributors |
| New Line Cinema | Warner Brothers |