Final Destination 3 is a 2006 American supernatural horror film directed by James Wong. A sequel to Final Destination 2 (2003), it is the third installment in the Final Destination film series. Wong and Glen Morgan, who worked on the franchise's first film, wrote the screenplay. Final Destination 3 stars Mary Elizabeth Winstead and Ryan Merriman, and takes place years after the first film. Winstead plays Wendy Christensen, a high school graduate who has a premonition that a roller coaster she and her classmates are riding will derail. Although she saves some of them, Death begins hunting the survivors. Wendy realizes photographs she took at the amusement park contain clues about her classmates' death. With survivor and friend Kevin Fischer (Merriman), Wendy tries to use this knowledge to save the rest of them and ruin Death's scheme.
The film's development began shortly after the release of Final Destination 2; Jeffrey Reddick, creator of the franchise and a co-writer of the first two films, did not return for the third one. Unlike the second film, which was a direct sequel to the first, the producers envisioned Final Destination 3 as a stand-alone film. The idea of featuring a roller coaster derailment as the opening-scene disaster came from New Line Cinema executive Richard Bryant. From the beginning, Wong and Morgan saw control as a major theme in the film. Casting began in March 2005 and concluded in April. Like the previous two installments, it was filmed in Vancouver, Canada. The first two weeks of the three-month shoot were spent filming the roller coaster's derailment.
Following its premiere at Grauman's Chinese Theatre on February 2, 2006, the film was released in cinemas in the United States on February 10, 2006. The DVD, released on July 25, 2006, includes commentaries, documentaries, a deleted scene and an animated video. A special-edition DVD called "Thrill Ride Edition" includes a feature called "Choose Their Fate", which acts as an interactive film, allowing viewers to make decisions at specific points in the film that alter the course of the story.
Final Destination 3 received a mixed critical response. The film was a financial success and, with box office receipts of nearly $118 million, the highest-grossing installment in the franchise at the time. A fourth film, The Final Destination, was released in August 2009.
Plot
In 2005, high school student Wendy Christensen visits an amusement park in Pennsylvania with her boyfriend Jason Wise, her best friend Carrie Dreyer, Carrie's boyfriend Kevin Fischer, and their classmates to celebrate their graduation.
As they board the Devil's Flight roller coaster, Wendy has a premonition that a camcorder, dropped by one of her friends during the ride, will land on the ride's tracks and will be run over by the train cars, causing the hydraulics securing the restraints and train cars to fail during the ride, killing everyone on board. She convinces nine people including Kevin, best friends Ashley Freund and Ashlyn Halperin, alumnus Frankie Cheeks, athlete Lewis Romero, and goth couple Ian McKinley and Erin Ulmer, not to ride the roller coaster, but fails to save Jason and Carrie, who are among the remaining passengers killed in the derailment.
Weeks later, Kevin tells Wendy about the explosion of Flight 180 and the survivors' subsequent deaths, believing they may be in a similar situation. At a tanning salon, Ashley and Ashlyn are burnt alive in malfunctioning tanning beds. Now convinced that Death is stalking them, Wendy and Kevin set out to save the remaining survivors using omens hidden in photographs of the survivors that Wendy took on the night of the crash.
When Wendy and Kevin pull into a drive-thru restaurant and observe Frankie's photo, a runaway semi-trailer truck forces them to escape Kevin's truck before it collides. The collision causes the truck's engine to burst out of the hood and grille, killing Frankie, who was in the car in front of them, as the fan sliced his skull. The next day, Wendy and Kevin fail to save Lewis, whose head is crushed by two weights from a weight machine at the school gym. They find Ian and Erin working at a hardware store, where a chain reaction from a runaway forklift allows Wendy to save Ian from his death. However, Death skips to Erin, who falls on a nail gun that shoots repeatedly through her head, killing her.