What are you waiting for? Jennifer Love Hewitt announced Friday that she will return to the slasher franchise I Know What You Did Last Summer for a reboot being directed by Jennifer Kaytin Robinson.
“It’s never too late to go back. Julie James is returning. I know what you will be doing next summer!” Love Hewitt, who starred in the original 1997 film and its 1998 sequel, I Still Know What You Did Last Summer, announced on Instagram.
Her text accompanied an image of her looking in a mirror filled with Post-Its declaring, you guessed it, “I Know What You Did Last Summer” — a throwback to the 1997 film written by Scream creator Kevin Williamson, directed by Jim Gillespie, and starring Ryan Phillippe, Freddie Prinze Jr. and Sarah Michelle Gellar. The latter two, long married, met on the film’s Wilmington, North Carolina set.
Here is the iconic “What are you waiting for?” scene:
Jennifer Love Hewitt Wants Her Return as Julie James to Mean Something
In an interview with the I’ve Never Said This Before With Tommy DiDario podcast, which comes out next week but was released early to The Hollywood Reporter, Hewitt said she wanted to be sure her return to the franchise had some real substance.
“It has only been scheduling and me trying to make sure that if I go back to the franchise, I just don’t want to be the ghost of ’90s past,” Hewitt said. “I really want to do something, and I want to be there for Julie James fans. … I just want it to feel like, you know, if she comes back then it means something.”
Also Read: 13 Slasher Movies to Watch This Friday the 13th — Including I Know What You Did Last Summer
The original film is about a quarter of teenagers who accidentally kill someone while driving and vow to cover up the death. But a mysterious hook-handed slasher begins hunting them and the people around them.
The new film will also star Prinze, as well as new castmembers Chase Sui Wonders, Madelyn Cline, Sarah Pidgeon, Tyriq Withers and Jonah Haur-King.
But Gellar will not be back, for reasons that require a spoiler on the original film. As she told People earlier this year: “I am dead.”
She means her character, Helen Shivers, is dead. Still, she noted, the new film’s director is her best friend.
“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.”
Phillippe’s character, Barry Cox, also seems unlikely to return. Another spoiler: He was last seen dead in the icebox of a fishing boat, alongside Helen, in the original I Know What You Did Last Summer.
The film, based on the 1973 young adult novel by Lois Duncan, was part of a wave of self-aware, twisty teen slasher films that smartened up the genre after Williamson deconstructed it with 1996’s Scream, directed by Wes Craven.
The new film, written by Sam Lansky and Robinson off a draft by Leah McKendrick, will be theatrically released by Sony Pictures next summer — on July 18, 2025.
The series 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.
Main image: Freddie Prinze Jr., Jennifer Love Hewitt, Sarah Michelle Gellar and Ryan Phillippe in the original I Know What You Did Last Summer. Columbia Pictures.
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