Someone dressed like a fisherman is again killing the young people of Southport in the I Know What You Did Last Summer trailer, which reboots the original 1997 slasher. But this time the young have an advantage: This has all happened before. And so the character played by Chase Sui Wonders seeks out ’90s survivor Julie James, Jennifer Love Hewitt.
“Someone is coming after us, ” Wonders’ character says to James. “I need your help.”
To which James replies, with a dramatic turn: “I just have one question — what did you do last summer?”
Accidentally apparently killed someone of course! At least, if the new I Know What You Did Last Summer, from director Jennifer Kaytin Robinson, follows the charming setup of the 1997 original, directed by Jim Gillespie from a script by Scream writer Kevin Williamson, based on the book by Lois Duncan.
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Also, the new I Know What You Did Last Summer trailer suggests that the reboot will be a bloodbath — no, really. The trailer features star Madelyn Cline trying to unwind with a bath bomb and a guided meditation but that bomb makes the water look like, well, something else. Foreshadowing!
In fact, not even foreshadowing — because at the exact moment she’s having a soak, her male companion, played by Jonah Hauer-King, is being dealt with via harpoon.
The 2025 I Know What You Did Last Summer Trailer vs. I Know What You Did Last Summer 1997
Duncan’s novel came out in 1973, which proves that every generation deserves their own version of a killer fisherman hunting young folks who made just made one mistake. This time around they’re played by Wonders, Cline, and Tyriq Withers.
The accidental apparent murderers of the 1997 I Know What You Did Last Summer also sought the help of an elder — in the original film it was the reclusive Melissa Egan (Anne Heche). Julie James, having dealt with this sort of thing in both I Know What You Did Last Summer and 1998’s I Still Know What You Did Last Summer, seems to be holding it together better than Egan: Instead of living in isolation, she’s walking around what appears to be a lovely campus.
Freddie Prinze Jr. is also back, as Ray Bronson, sharing a dire warning at a town meeting, based on intense personal experience. Prinze’s real-life wife Sarah Michelle Gellar is [spoilers from the orginal!] not back, however, as her character, Helen Shivers, is no more. The same goes, presumably, for Ryan Phillippe’s Barry Cox.
Gellar explained recently to People: “I am dead.” But Gellar still has a place in the I Know What You Did last summer world:
“My best friend is directing it, so we joke that I have an unofficial job, which is I am continuity,” she told People. “So I’m always the one telling her, ‘Well, that would happen, or that wouldn’t happen with those characters,’ so I do have kind of an unofficial job title.”
[End spoilers.]
The new film, written by Sam Lansky and Robinson, will be theatrically released by Sony Pictures on July 18.
The franchise also included direct-to-video installment, I’ll Always Know What You Did Last Summer, released in 2006. It had a separate standalone storyline, separate from the original two films, with none of the original cast involved.
Also, the coming of the I Know What You Did Last Summer trailer seems like a fine occasion to shout out the very eerie trailer for the unrelated but similarly named and themed Last Summer, about a trio of teens played by Richard Thomas, Bruce Davison and Barbara Hershey who, in a summer on Fire Island, do bad things involving a younger teen, played by Catherine Burns, who earned an Oscar nomination for the role. We’ll always wonder if the movie was kicking around in Duncan’s mind when she wrote I Know What You Did Last Summer.
Main image: Madelyn Cline in the new I Know What You Did Last Summer trailer. Sony Pictures Entertainment.