Horror legend Tony Todd improvised a goodbye to his fans in Final Destination: Bloodlines

Fans of the Final Destination movies know there isn’t a lot of continuity, apart from each new sequel returning to the basic concept: Someone has a premonition of impending disaster and uses it to save the lives of people who would have died in that disaster, but death finds convoluted ways to claim them anyway. Even more than in more horror franchises, there aren’t legacy characters to check in on, or an elaborate, developing timeline packed with lore. And that’s because the darkest joke of Final Destination movies is that none of the central characters ever does manage to outwit death for long.

But there is one throughline for the whole series: Candyman star Tony Todd as mortician William Bludworth, the wise old soul who lays out the rules of death for the doomed protagonists, so they can fight a little longer. William Bludworth appears in three of the five original Final Destination movies, with a couple of voiceover Easter eggs from Todd in a fourth movie. And he’s back in the latest installation, Final Destination: Bloodlines, one of the final movies Tony Todd shot before his 2024 death — this time with a heartfelt message co-directors Zach Lipovsky and Adam B. Stein say was aimed directly at his fans.

Lipovsky says bringing Todd back to the franchise was a no-brainer for the directors, especially since he wanted to reprise the role as much as they wanted him back.

“He really wanted to be in this movie,” Lipovsky told Polygon via Zoom. “He was sick when we were developing the film, and we were worried he wouldn’t be well enough [by the time we were shooting], but he really, really wanted to be there. And we wanted to craft a narrative around him, to give him a bit more of an origin story, to fill him out as a character.”

Lipovsky says William Bludworth has always been “a bit of a mysterious trope mentor figure” in the Final Destination franchise, but that he never really got his due as a character. “Knowing this would probably be his last Final Destination movie, we wanted to flesh him out, give some answers as to why he’s been such an interesting character in the other films, and then also give him the ability to have an ending, and say goodbye to the character and goodbye to the audience.”

Todd isn’t a major part of Bloodlines — he has one significant scene, where he once again meets a new group of protagonists who are staring death in the face. But Stein says the directors asked Todd to help shape that scene as an opportunity to explain Bludworth’s legacy, and the legacy of the Final Destination movies themselves.

“We asked if he would be comfortable putting aside the script and just really speaking from the heart, directly to the fans, about what life’s all about,” Stein told Polygon. “We asked him, ‘Hey, Tony, what is all this Final Destination death stuff? What do you want to leave the fans with, if you had to say it in your own words?’ And the take that’s in the movie is really him speaking from the heart directly to the fans about what he thinks life and death are all about. I think that’s why it’s so emotionally powerful, because it’s really him.”

“We worked incredibly closely with him to craft that,” Lipovsky says. “[We wanted him to be able to] speak to the audience from the heart, and give a really meaningful moment.”

Given the Final Destination movies’ tendency to clean all the characters off the slate (the other longest surviving character made it into two movies) — and given some particular reveals in Final Destination: Bloodlines about William Bludworth’s origins and the fate that’s coming for him — I absolutely expected a post-credits scene where death finally catches up with him. But Bloodlines doesn’t have a post-credits scene at all, or a finale for William Bludworth. Stein and Lipovsky admit that they considered doing exactly that.

“It was debated,” Lipovsky says. “But in the end, we decided the way he kind of walks through the door, whistling, into the sunset, felt like the right way to say goodbye to Tony.”

“Ultimately, we wanted to make sure he was able to not be a victim, but have power in the way he’s facing death,” Stein says. “And that ultimately tipped the scale — rather than creating a death sequence for his character, [we wanted] to give him the platform to say goodbye on his own terms.

“That final couple of lines he says are just him,” Stein says. “The script ended with ‘I’m retiring, and I’m going to go enjoy the time I have left,’ and that’s it. But he brings it to the next level with what he says at that door, which is basically, ‘All life is precious. Enjoy the time you have left. Enjoy every single second, because you never know when.”

Final Destinations: Bloodlines is in theaters now.