Trivia / Final Destination 3

• Ability over Appearance: Wendy was written to be "a perky blonde". Mary Elizabeth Winstead, a calmer brunette, ended up impressing in the audition and they retooled the character to accommodate her.
• Dawson Casting: The film's cast is predominantly teenagers—yet the only one who is played by an actual teenage actor is Erin, whose actress, Alexz Johnson, was 18 at the time of the filming.
  • Mary Elizabeth Winstead, playing the lead Wendy, was 20. As did Amanda Crew, playing Wendy's younger sister, Julie.
  • Both Ryan Merriman (Kevin) and Jesse Moss (Jason) were 22.
  • Chelan Simmons (Ashley) and Maggie Ma (Perry) were both 24.
  • 25-year-old Texas Battle (Lewis) and Crystal Lowe (Ashlyn), still playing seniors.
  • Kris Lemche (Ian) was 27.
  • The worst offender, however, is Gina Holden, who played senior Carrie while at the same time being 30 years old. She is even older than Sam Easton, who was 27 and yet played the older alumnus Frankie, excusing him from this trope.
• Fake American: Only three of the main cast are Americans: Mary Elizabeth Winstead (Wendy), Ryan Merriman (Kevin), and Texas Battle (Lewis). Including supporting characters will net Ecstasia Sanders (Amber), who appeared in a grand total of two short scenes. Everyone else is Canadian.
• Spared by the Cut: The final film has a Bolivian Army Ending which heavily implies that the remaining survivors die in a train crash. An alternate ending omits that scene and implies that they might have actually cheated Death; said ending was used in the novelization.
• Throw It In!: Texas Battle had a habit of ad-libbing the word 'fuck' so many times on-set.
• Voice-Only Cameo: Tony Todd has a small but pivotal role in every Final Destination film, except this one. In this one, he is only heard as the voice of the rollercoaster that says there's "no exit after the turnstile. I'll see you soon."
• What Could Have Been:
  • A.J. Cook and Michael Landers were supposed to reprise their roles as Kimberly and Thomas from Final Destination 2 as cameos at the end, where they get killed alongside the main cast in the train accident. However, scheduling conflicts prevented their return, so their fates went unexplained, at least if one only consider the theatrical films as canon. If you take alternate endings and Word of God as canon, both of them were said to be killed before the events of the film in a wood chipper accident. Kimberly and Wendy would have been revealed to be distant cousins.
  • Both Ashley Tisdale and Vanessa Hudgens auditioned for parts in this film.
  • The original script had Ian McKinley as a female character, who tried avoiding her boyfriend. Erin likewise was originally a male.
  • It was planned to shoot the film in 3-D but it was deemed too expensive. The fourth film was later shot in 3-D.
  • Ian McKinley was originally named Logan and Frankie Cheeks was named Scotty.
  • Frankie was planned to survive his accident with only a broken neck by looking in his rear view mirror and driving away. He would later be arrested for "indecent exposure" after police found pervy photographs on his camera. This was later used for the "Choose Their Fate" special feature on the DVD of the movie.
  • An alternate version of the tanning bed scene was shot where Ashlyn got up to answer a text as the shelf was knocked over knocking her out, so only Ashley was locked in by it and Ashlyn rescued her after a few seconds of burning, but both were killed by Ashley's bed cracking and dripping her onto live wires as Ashlyn was pulling her up. This version may have been cut due to the more explicit nudity upping the rating.

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