Blooper: At a couple of times in the film, Alex refers to Valerie Lewton as "Mrs Lewton". She's called "Miss" elsewhere in the film, there's no mention or sight of a husband, and she doesn't mention a divorce either.
California Doubling: Vancouver International Airport doubled for JFK, and British Columbia at large for upstate New York. Ironically the scenes inside the plane were filmed in Long Island.
Contractual Purity: This was one of many "weird" roles Devon Sawa took to get away from his teen heartthrob image in the 90s. The first such role Idle Hands, was what convinced them to cast him as Alex.
Dawson Casting: Plaguing the entire teenage main cast, who are supposed to be high school seniors. None of them are of high school age.
And on-screen couple Kerr Smith (Carter) and Amanda Detmer (Terry) were both 27. They're only three years younger than their on-screen teacher, Ms. Lewton, whose actress, Kristen Cloke, was 31.
Dyeing for Your Art: Ali Larter is blonde normally but becomes brunette to play Clear. Notably she's brunette in the original ending but has reverted to blonde in the re-shot one. As she's still blonde in the sequel, we can assume Clear is a Dye Hard blonde.
Fake American: Alex's actor, Devon Sawa, is Canadian. So do Tod's (Chad E. Donella) and his brother, George's (Brendan Fehr), plus Alex's mother's (Barbara Tyson), though curiously, his father (Robert Wisden) is British.
Focus Group Ending: The original ending featured a somewhat happy ending. The hero sleeps with his love interest, gets her pregnant, then dies. The movie closes on the two survivors standing by his grave a year later. Test audiences hated it and said they wanted more Rube Goldberg deathtraps. Ironically, Final Destination 2 revolved around that plot point, just with different players involved.
Orphaned Reference: Tod's death has two relating to the original concept for Death (see below). He's scared by some shadow in the mirror, and the water vanishes to make it look like a suicide.
Real-Life Relative: Kristen Cloke, who plays Ms. Lewton, is married to Glenn Morgan, one of the writers.
Ripped from the Headlines: Subverted. It's widely thought that the movie was based off the real life disaster of TWA Flight 800 - which exploded en-route to Paris after taking off from JFK. However the script that was written for The X-Files was completed two years before the event in question. However, the final script was completed shortly after the accident was fully investigated, and may have incorporated aspects of the real disaster.
Spared by the Cut: In the original scripted and filmed ending, Alex makes a Heroic Sacrifice while Clear and Carter live. In the final film, Carter dies while Alex survives (at least until the Time Skip between the first two films).
Kristen Cloke improvised everything Ms. Lewton says to persuade the co-pilot to let the teachers back on the plane.
The part where Carter elbows Billy in the car was put in because Seann William Scott had a sore lip that day. They added blood and had Carter hit him in the middle of the scene.
The little sequence with the Alka Seltzer in the water had to be added after Terry's death because test audiences were still recovering from the shock.
John Denver came on the loudspeaker while writer Glenn Morgan was in the airport and he thought "hey, he just died in a plane crash". And they wrote that into the film.
The original script for the film by Jeffrey Reddick was far different from the final version of the film. Along with most of the characters having different names (though Alex's name was kept) they were also different from there final versions. The original script also leaned more heavily into the guilt and isolation that the survivors faced from there peers. Also the script was far darker as rather than the characters falling victim to accidents, instead The Angel of Death personified their guilt and forced them to commit suicide. The film also ended on a more darker version of the alternate ending. Alex and his girlfriend Kimberly (who later became Clear) seemingly escape death because Kimberly is pregnant with Alex's baby. But after the baby is born The Angel of Death is shown to come for her now that she no longer has an innocent life inside her.
A romantic subplot was shot with Alex and Clear. Their kiss and implied sex was cut from the movie, relegating it to subtext. The next film confirms that they did become a couple eventually.
The ending was drastically different. After Alex sacrifices himself, we cut to Clear giving birth to his baby. The ending is a peaceful one, where Carter also survives - and the characters are free of death's design.
Death was imagined as a much more obvious entity, as seen in Tod's death - seeing the shadow in the mirror and the water flowing back into the toilet. After this, the filmmakers changed their minds and just had the rest of the deaths as accidents.
The original casting choices for Alex and Clear were Tobey Maguire and Kirsten Dunst. Both actors would later star in Sam Raimi's "Spider-Man" trilogy as Spider-Man and Mary Jane, respectively.
Working Title: Flight 180. It was changed to Final Destination to avoid confusion with other plane-based movies like Con Air and Air Force One.
