Every Character Who Has Survived The Final Destination Movies

This article contains spoilers for every "Final Destination" movie.

For over 25 years, the "Final Destination" series has instilled a very special fear of death with audiences. Everyone meets their end at some point or another, but these movies take perverse pleasure in showing all of the grisly manners it can manifest. Unlike other horror franchises like "Friday the 13th" or "Scream," where you can physically see the killer coming toward you, in the world of "Final Destination," Death can take the form of just about anything. All it takes is a loose screw, a curling iron, or a creep with a box full of hook hands to get the ball rolling.

It's very fitting for a franchise about a deadly omniscient presence to make you anxious of your surroundings at all times. But try as they might, the characters in every "Final Destination" usually meet a grisly end one way or another. Death doesn't like to be cheated and is going to collect however it can, even if that means letting some time pass before it strikes. Clear Rivers (Ali Larter) may have survived the first movie, but "Final Destination 2" gave her the fiery demise it had been keeping in its back pocket for a special occasion.

By the end, the lead character, along with a few other stragglers, believe that they won their lives back after playing Death's twisted game. The final scene, however, shows that they merely delayed the inevitable, much like life itself. Death doesn't like to leave loose ends, so the chances of survivors is minimal, but not impossible going off of the ending of "Final Destination 2."

The big incident that sets off the chain of events in "Final Destination 2" is a melee of carnage across the Route 23 highway. In the premonition that Kimberly (A.J. Cook) experiences, she's run over by a truck in her SUV, along with all of her friends. Additionally, the premonition kicks off the bloodbath with Thomas (Michael Landes), a state trooper, getting a massive log to the face. There isn't one person on this planet that feels safe driving behind a log truck thanks to this scene alone.

Once the premonition is over, Kimberly blocks the entrance to the highway, which saves her life, but still kills her friends in the process. She sticks by Thomas for most of the film as they, along with the other five survivors, attempt to figure out how to avoid the fates of the characters from the first movie. In "Final Destination 2," death is clearing players off the board by going backwards and the only way to survive, according to Tony Todd's Bludworth, is to introduce new life.

By the end of the film, Kimberly and Thomas are the only two survivors because the former technically drowns in the lake before getting resuscitated, therefore skipping over the latter. The last scene gives audiences one of the series' funniest deaths with a grill explosion, but the twosome are still left alive by the end of it. It's notable because every other character having been involved in a "Final Destination" premonition has either died before the credits or has been killed off in a subsequent installment.

One of the coolest aspects of "Final Destination 3" is an interactive special feature on the DVD that essentially lets you play "Choose Your Own Adventure" with the film at large. There are a notable number of avenues to go down, but there's an interesting aside that offers an alternate history of the survivors from "Final Destination 2."

One option allows you to view a newspaper story which reveals that Kimberly and Thomas died in a mysterious wood chipper accident years after the events of the second film. Details in the article indicate this was the first time they had seen each other in ages. It's a clever foreshadowing to the ending of "Final Destination 3," where Mary Elizabeth Winstead's Wendy realizes she's on the same subway train as her sister Julie (Amanda Crew) and Kevin (Ryan Merriman) before they all get slaughtered in death's grand design.

I wholeheartedly believe that they died between films, given that death doesn't seem to care about following the rules, but since Kimberly and Thomas' fates are left to a bonus feature, it's not technically considered canon. As the saying goes, if we didn't see it happen onscreen, then they didn't truly die. The death of Devon Sawa's Alex via a falling brick is also depicted in a newspaper, yet is actually featured in "Final Destination 2," as is Clear's confirmation that it happened.

I doubt the upcoming "Final Destination: Bloodlines" will see the series' only confirmed survivors physically return, but I do have a sneaking suspicion they'll be mentioned in some way.

The first five "Final Destination" movies are currently streaming on Max.