John Denver's "Rocky Mountain High", the song that accompanied most of the deaths in the original film, plays in the elevator that Eugene and Nora enter, and in the Dentist office.
A stunt coordinator on this movie is named Freddie Hice. In the movie a truck passed Kimberly's SUV with a man drinking a beer. The name on the truck is HICE Pale Ale.
The police officer radios in an accident at mile marker 180 (the accident where the news van eventually blows up). Also when Kim is standing next to her SUV at the exit ramp just before the officer pulls her out of the way of a truck, she sees a road work sign "next 180 feet". These are references to flight 180 in the first movie.
In the original Final Destination, many characters are named after black-and-white horror film stars or directors. In this movie, Kimberly Corman is named for famous horror director Roger Corman.
When the principal character enters the sanitarium the words "Get them off me" can be heard coming from one of the cells. This is a reference to a lunatic (also imprisoned in an asylum) in Hellbound: Hellraiser II, who carves himself up with a straight-razor because he suffers from a delusion that he is covered with bugs.
Filmmakers say that the man hanging on the jail bars when Kimberly walks into the insane asylum is put there to pay homage to Chief Bromden (Will Sampson) in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.
Writers Eric Bress and J. Mackye Gruber came to write this movie after Benderspink entertainment read "The Butterfly Effect". The writer agreed to do this if the studio would let them direct it.
The character of Tim was supposed to be nine and then thirteen but New Line decided it wasn't okay to kill off a little kid so they eventually settled on the age of 15.
When Nora tucks Tim in at night, dimming the lights, his face is illuminated with a skull outline, and can be better seen when the scene dissolves into the next, foreshadowing his death.
In the movie, Ali Larter's character is at the Stonybrook Mental Institution. However, there is a real town named Stony Brook on Long Island that is home to a university and medical hospital that bears its name. The map displayed on mapquest in the movie is the actual location.
(At 01:35) There is a sticker that says "ROAD TRIP" on it. The "T" is covered, so it reads "ROAD RIP", hinting at the opening accident about to happen.
In the opening sequence Kimberly's car keys are shown. Her key chain is an evil eye bead. The evil eye, in middle eastern cultures is a talisman that wards off evil spirits and negative energy, and by doing so protects the owner. There are also other superstitions regarding the evil eye, the main one states that the evil eye can not be bought for oneself, it has to be gifted to them.
When Evan is in his kitchen before his death, he leans over to get something out of his fridge and you can see the letter magnets "HEY E" on the side of the fridge. When Evan puts the left-over Chinese food container on the counter, the "H" magnet falls off and lands in the container. The letters left spell out the word "EYE," which foreshadows that Evan will die when he is impaled through the eye with a fire escape ladder.
Originally, Devon Sawa was to reprise his role of Alex Browning in this film, but a dispute concerning his contract with New Line Cinema could not be settled. In this film, it is implied by a newspaper clipping that his character Alex was killed off by a falling brick to the head.