All ‘Final Destination’ Movies Being Removed From HBO Max

HBO Max is losing a major movie franchise at the end of this month. Final Destination and its four beloved sequels will disappear from your queue on Wednesday, Aug. 31. If you’ve been meaning to get around to a binge watch of these horror classics, now is the time.

Final Destination premiered in 2000 and became an instant runaway success. The first movie is about a small group of friends who escape a mass-casualty event thanks to an uncanny premonition by one of them. However, the group begins to die off anyway in even more bizarre accidents, implying that they have somehow “cheated death” and are now being punished. Follow-up movies inflict this same fate on different groups of friends in different ways, while novels and comic books have expanded the lore even further.

Right now, you can watch all five Final Destination movies on HBO Max, but not for long. The streamer announced that the movies will leave the catalog at the end of August 2022, and it’s not clear if they will be coming back. It’s not clear why they are leaving, either – the movies were financed and distributed by New Line Cinema, which worked closely with HBO on its home video releases even before it was acquired by Warner Bros. in 2008.

This indicates that it may not be a licensing issue taking Final Destination out of the streaming rotation. HBO Max is undergoing some strange branding shifts right now in the midst of its parent company’s merger with Discovery Inc. Next summer, Warner Bros. Discovery intends to merge HBO Max and Discovery+ into one big streaming service, and it may not want to list horror content alongside wholesome family content by then.

Speculation aside, the Final Destination series is worth checking out sometime in the next two weeks. The movies were lauded in their time for breaking the formulaic model horror films were following, including slashers and monster movies. With so much experimentation in the horror genre these days, Final Destination deserves a bit of retrospective love.

All five Final Destination movies are streaming now on HBO Max. They are also scattered across some other obscure streaming apps and are available to rent or purchase on digital stores. They are available on Blu-ray and DVD individually or in a box set, and have some fan-favorite special features including extensive commentary tracks.They will leave HBO Max on Wednesday, Aug. 31.