The new Final Destination 6 directors faked their own decapitation to get the job

Specifically, the film is being handed over to Zach Lipovsky and Adam B. Stein, the directing team behind 2018 sci-fi thriller Freaks (and also, weirdly enough, the live-action Kim Possible movie and a couple of episodes of the revived Fraggle Rock). They join a production team that’s actually pretty damn solid, if we’re being honest: Spider-Man director Jon Watts is serving as a producer, and wrote a treatment for the story, which was then turned into a script by Guy Busick and Lori Evans Taylor. Busick’s been all over studio horror in recent years, with credits on the revived Scream movie earlier this year, as well as the incredibly fun Ready Or Not from 2019.

The story behind Lipovsky and Stein securing the gig is pretty brilliant, too: They’d apparently been in the running for the job for a while (New Line’s been looking for a director for the project for like a year) when they hopped on a Zoom call to make a big last pitch. Mid-pitch, the fireplace behind the pair suddenly sparked up, starting a small fire. The duo worked to extinguish the flames, sat back down—and then the ceiling fan above them collapsed, “decapitating one of the filmmakers.”

Now that’s how you pitch a fucking Final Destination movie; executives reportedly broke out laughing at the combination of pre-recorded footage and visual effects, calling it the “cherry on top” that secured Lipovsky and Stein the job.