At Downtown LA Law, our goal is to give our clients the help they need when dealing with their personal injury claims, regardless of the nature of their individual ordeals. So, to highlight our commitment to each and every one of our clients, we decided to watch all instalments of the Final Destination film franchise, to see just how many of the characters’ injuries have actually happened in real life.

Ahead of the franchise’s 22nd anniversary this year, we’ve analyzed data from more than 300,000 ER visits and the five movies, to discover the most common ‘Final Destination injuries’, experienced in real life by Americans. HINT you might want to be extra cautious around the ladder in your garage!

Exactly 4,162 people were reported to have sustained an injury from a ladder since 2019 in the US, according to the latest data from the National Electronic Injury Surveillance System (NEISS), mirroring the scene from Final Destination 2, where character Evan Lewis’ eye is gouged out by a falling fire escape ladder…

For anyone who’s unfamiliar with the Final Destination film franchise, it tells the stories of survivors who have premonitions of their deaths, allowing them to ‘cheat death’. However, across all five films, they soon learn that death is inescapable, and are killed in strange and unpredictable ways.

To create our list, we tracked every type of death recorded in each of the five instalments of the Final Destination franchise, to compare them against actual injury data from the last recorded year in the US*.

The Top 10 Most Common Injuries

The ten most common ‘Final Destination injuries’, and the number of real life occurrences* are:

1.  Ladder-related injury 4,162
   Final Destination 2 – eye gouged out by a falling fire escape ladder
2. Scaling/moving fences 2,121
   Final Destination 5 – cut in half by a metal fence
3. Lifting weights 930
   Final Destination 3 – crushed by weights
4. Scolded with oil 335
   Final Destination 5 – oil truck spill
5. Lawn Mower accidents 229
   The Final Destination – rock shot through eye socket by a lawn mower
6. Escalator malfunctions/trips
   The Final Destination – caught in escalator gears – 211
7. Shot with a nail gun 160
   Final Destination 3 – shot by a nail gun
8. Roller coasters accidents 14
   Final Destination 3 – roller coaster crash
9. Barbecue burns 10
   Final Destination 2 – barbecue explosion
10. Tanning bed burns 1
    Final Destination 3 – tanning bed set on fire

Our research also revealed that ‘explosions’ were the most common cause of death in the Final Destination films, with 398 casualties, while ‘falling’ was the most common cause for injury in the United States since 2019 accounting for 125,821 injuries.

The Top Ten Most Causes of Injury/Death

The top ten most common causes of injury/death, based on real life NEISS data, and the number of times each occurs in the film franchise, are:

1. Falling – 125,821 real life injuries – 3 Final Destination deaths
2. Cut/laceration – 56,614 real life injuries – 4 Final Destination death
3. Burned/incinerated/melted – 6,396 real life injuries – 5 Final Destination death
4. Shooting – 1,652 real life injuries – 4 Final Destination deaths
5. Crushing – 1,206 real life injuries – 36 Final Destination deaths
6. Impaled/stabbed – 710 real life injuries – 10 Final Destination deaths
7. Explosions – 443 real life injuries – 398 Final Destination deaths
8. Drowning/water related – 189 real life injuries – 2 Final Destination deaths
9. Roller Coaster – 14 real life injuries – 7 Final Destination deaths
10. Strangulation – 3 real life injuries – 1 Final Destination death

Farid Yaghoubtil, Senior Trial Attorney at Downtown L.A Law Group, says:

“When looking for film franchises which highlight the wacky and strange ways people can get injured, you don’t need to look any further than Final Destination. Delving into the deaths across the entirety of the franchise though, even I was surprised at just how creative and imaginative the teams working on the films had been.”

“The purpose of the research was to establish how, even though a lot of the casualties in the films are very strange, being injured is something that can happen at any time, and can also happen in extremely unusual circumstances. Looking at the NEISS data, this is certainly true – our hope is that the research will remind people to take care of themselves in every situation.”

Source:

*https://www.cpsc.gov/Research–Statistics/NEISS-Injury-Data
**https://listofdeaths.fandom.com/wiki/Final_Destination