I Know What You Did Last Summer (2025)

We are living in the golden age of the legacy sequel. A quick browse of this summer’s weekend box office reports makes this abundantly clear. The movies at the top may frequently change, but what doesn’t is the fact that they belong to franchises that have been around a long time. Titles you might remember from your childhood, like How to Train Your Dragon and Lilo & Stitch, are back, remade with a mix of live-action and CGI. Others, a new generation’s take on old characters and themes, can be categorized as reboots. There are soft reboots (Jurassic World: Rebirth) and there are hard reboots (Superman). There are movies that blur the line between remake and sequel. One of the better such undertakings, 2022’s Scream, coined the term “requel” to refer to these. And that’s probably how one could classify 28 Years Later, Karate Kid: Legends, and Final Destination: Bloodlines.

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Not all popular movies demand the legacy sequel treatment, something the new I Know What You Did Last Summer makes perfectly clear. The first movie bearing that title arrived in the fall of 1997 and it could not have been better timed. Scream had just breathed new life into the horror genre and this loose adaptation of a 1970s Lois Duncan suspense novel hailed from the same screenwriter (Kevin Williamson, creator of the then-imminently launching “Dawson’s Creek”) with a red hot cast led by network TV stars Jennifer Love Hewitt and Sarah Michelle Gellar. Critics were nonplussed, but teenagers were hooked and the film grossed a robust $72 million domestically and $126 million worldwide, numbers that adjust to $145 M and $253 M today.

Such grosses are out of reach for the vast majority of horror movies, let alone a little R-rated teen slasher made for just $17 M. Always on the lookout for an enduring franchise to revive, Sony returns to the fictional town of Southport, North Carolina, sending the series back to theaters for the first time since the 1998 sequel I Still Know What You Did Last Summer. Since then, there was a direct-to-video sequel in 2006 and a short-lived 8-episode Amazon Prime TV series in 2021, both sporting all-new casts. For the fifth effort in the line, Hewitt is back in a supporting role, as is her original movie love interest Freddie Prinze Jr. Gellar, Prinze’s wife of 23 years, also returns for a surprise cameo. But none of that can save this unimaginatively titled revival from being an absolute trainwreck.

Jennifer Kaytin Robinson, creator of MTV’s “Sweet/Vicious”, writer-director of the 2022 Netflix movie Do Revenge, and Taika Waititi’s co-scribe on Thor: Love and Thunder, takes the helm here. Robinson shares story credit with Scrambled‘s Leah McKendrick and screenplay credit with West Coast Time editor Sam Lansky. None of these three seem especially versed in cinema or enamored with the original movie. The latter is forgivable; if you weren’t 14 years old when it came out like I was, it’s probably hard to find much value in it unique from other teen slasher flicks. But the lack of cinematic knowledge does hinder this new Summer flick early and often, as it repeatedly fails on basic technical levels, suffering from insufficient camera coverage and an overreliance on looped dialogue to try to salvage this.

This time out, our protagonists are in their twenties and number five. They consist of de facto protagonist Ava (Chase Sui Wonders), her engaged New Agey bestie Danica (Madelyn Cline), Danica’s nepo baby fiancee Teddy (Tyriq Withers), Ava’s quasi-love interest Milo (Jonah Hauer-King), and Stevie (Sarah Pidgeon), a troubled girl on the outs from the others. Instead of reckless driving resulting in a stranger’s death, these houligans cause someone else to drive recklessly and onto the precipice of one of Southport’s notoriously windy cliffs. When he apparently dies, they feel responsible, something that doesn’t feel like it’d bear out in a court of law.

Nonetheless, you know the drill, probably. The guilt lingers and a year later, Danica gets an anonymous hand-written note saying “I Know What You Did Last Summer.” She has an alcoholic new fiancee, who becomes the first casualty of a mysterious, hook-wielding figure in a rain slicker ensemble. Another acquaintance’s true crime podcast draws the group’s attention to the forgotten 1997 killing spree and the parallels of their predicament become clear enough for Ava to track down Julie James (Hewitt), a college professor who apparently teaches about PTSD.

This series has always been linked to Scream due to its timing and the Kevin Williamson connection, specifically a tagline that sparked a consequential lawsuit from the Weinsteins over at Miramax. But Scream always had irony and a working knowledge of horror cinema in its arsenal. Even in its best moments, the original Summer was just surface-level genre entertainment. If you were laughing, you were laughing at the movie and its dumb characters, not with them. Not all horror movies need snark and self-awareness, but the original Summer didn’t have all that much to offer in its place, just hot young actors wrestling with guilt and trying to avoid a determined fisherman’s hook.

Robinson and company don’t add much to that equation here. The filmmakers are in their late thirties, the principal cast is in their late twenties, and the target audience seems to be Gen Z. Hewitt and Prinze are in their late 40s and their contemporaries are in the midst of aging out of Hollywood’s chief demographic. It’s tough to imagine any moviegoer showing up to this with great reverence for the original two movies and leaving delighted by this untimely extension to it. What is a legacy sequel without reverence and nostalgia? It’s 2025’s I Know What You Did Last Summer, a shoddy, unpolished movie whose $18 million budget barely eclipsed the original’s modest price tag, ignoring nearly three decades of inflation. This would practically feel at home on Lifetime or Shudder or some other service you don’t think very highly of or have access to. It’s too bad Sony’s free ad-supported Crackle service never took off and recently closed. This movie could have been a selling point for that at least until poor word of mouth spread.

Prinze has not honed his acting skills in the quarter-century since he last held starring roles. Hewitt is a little better, but her reprisal of Julie James feels like little league compared to titans like Harrison Ford and Jamie Lee Curtis returning to their hallowed legacy-sequeled universes.

As a commercial play, the new Summer might fare okay, but I have my doubts. As a film, it is an utter disappointment that will do little but sully your possibly fond, probably faint memories of the original movie.

Buy I Know What You Did Last Summer from Amazon.com:
4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray + Digital Steelbook · Blu-ray + Digital · DVD · Prime Video

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