How Did Pixar Influence The 'Final Destination' Directors?

The newest Final Destination movie has been tearing apart the box office, limb by limb, and it's a raucous good time. It's a movie that just cooks from the opening frame to the big finish. It has so many great set pieces that really amp up the tension and got a bunch of cheers in my theater.

These were elaborate and intricate, almost Rube Goldberg-like ways to kill people that escalated time and time again. When you see a movie like this, it delivers the promise of the premise, and everything about it just explodes.

Well, a violent horror movie like this one actually has a surprisingly family-friendly inspiration for all those big moments: Pixar.

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The directors of the movie, Zach Lipovsky and Adam Stein, expanded on that and more to The Wrap.

Their movie is an incredibly inventive story that follows how death is actually following one family for decades.

To even win the right to direct the latest movie in the franchise, they actually made a video where they faked their own deaths and used it during their pitch.

That's how you know these guys were thinking outside of the box. But when it came to the emotional hook of the movie, they wanted to do something very normal.

“Our thesis we sold to New Line was that, if you really care about these people, the audience is going to really root for them and it will make the horror set pieces scarier,” Lipovsky said. “In the past, a lot of times, the characters were fairly thin, and many characters were stereotypes that were purposefully unlikable so that you could enjoy their death. We proposed that if you really take this family dynamic and create relatable connections between all of them, the audience will be rooting for them, and that’ll make them really on the edge of their seat when death comes for them.”

When it comes to those central kills in the movie, Lipovsky said, “For many years, groups of people sitting around dining room tables, brainstorming, iterating, working with the crew, thinking of new ideas constantly.”

That kind of teamwork of everyone being all hands on deck and everyone's ideas being considered, they say, was inspired by the process Pixar pioneered.

Hearing that these two directors were so collaborative in the entire process is a really great lesson for people trying to break in. They worked within the limits of themselves, asking for help and getting lots of ideas, then picking the best ones.

They took a character-centric look at the throughline of the movie and made you care about the people in the story, so the big and ridiculous kills paid off.

There's a lot in here to love.

Let me know what you think in the comments.