When compared to other horror franchises, Final Destination continues to entertain audiences, thanks to its simple and intelligent concept: if characters don't die when they're meant to, Death itself intervenes and will find them. The movies follow various young adult characters as they figure out that they're part of this horrible situation, and each movie focuses on a unique location.
When Escape Room was released in 2019, followed by its 2021 sequel Escape Room: Tournament Of Champions, horror fans weren't given a lot to enjoy. The Escape Room movies aren't scary, and they could definitely benefit from some of the things that the Final Destination franchise is known for: inventive kills and Rube Goldberg-esque scenarios.
Final Destination is famous for its death sequences, which makes sense since if a group of movies are going to tell stories about people who Death haunts until he finally finishes them off, the deaths have to be shocking and epic. This is something that Escape Room (2019) and Escape Room: Tournament Of Champions (2021) should have done.
In Final Destination 5, Roy (Brent Stait) is killed by a massive hook that goes right through his brain. In Final Destination 3, which is a great horror movie, two characters are killed in an incredibly inventive way that is hard to stop thinking about. Ashlyn (Yan-Kay Crystal Lowe) and Ashley (Chelan Simmons) are already well-written characters as they're pretty, popular girls who are nice to the main character Wendy (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) and when they head to a tanning salon, it's obvious that this isn't going to end well for them. The girls are literally burned alive when the temperature of the tanning beds is raised to a high, fatal level.
Horror movie deaths absolutely need to make an impact, but Escape Room and its sequel fail on this level. The characters are in some creepy rooms in each movie as they try to win the game, of course, but no one dies in a way that any audience member would really remember.
Final Destination can be said to have Rube Goldberg-esque death scenes because it's a machine that is triggered by an event. In the case of these movies, Death kills a few people and is meant to kill more, and because there are some survivors, the machine keeps going and targeting them. It works brilliantly and because it continues in each film, fans always know exactly what to expect, while there are still big surprises to keep audiences engaged. If Escape Room could have done the same thing, then both films would be scarier. The reason why Final Destination is so smart is that it feels like no character can run away from Death. Escape Room is definitely missing that sense of urgency.
It doesn't feel inevitable that the main characters will die in each Escape Room movie, but it doesn't feel like they have much hope of survival, either. This puts the movies in a tough and awkward position in the world of horror films. The characters don't stand out from one another enough for audiences to decide who can make it and who can't, and after a while, viewers are likely to become pretty tired of watching the same thing unfold over and over again. If horror movies are going to be set in an escape room that has been engineered to murder people, which is definitely an intense concept, why not focus on the deaths more? Why not create some really out-of-the-box sequences that horror fans will continue to talk about? Even though there's an evil man behind these escape rooms, and Minos Corporation has been setting people up to die, nothing in the movies really makes an impression.
If Escape Room had been influenced by Final Destination, the movies could be much more fun to watch and they would inspire a lot of discussion. Horror fans want to be taken by surprise and they want to be in awe of what they've just seen, and there's a reason why people still discuss the deaths in Final Destination: they feel unique to the movies and like they couldn't happen in any other slasher franchise. That's exactly the impression that a scary film should be making.
When fans get to see Final Destination 6, there will definitely be the kind of well-thought out and well-executed death sequences that fans are used to (no pun intended), and fans will once again be reminded of why this horror franchise is so good. Final Destination does feel campy at times, but the filmmakers realized that they wanted to create deaths that fans would really notice and talk about, and that is its legacy.