How Does the New ‘I Know What You Did Last Summer’ Movie Fit Into the Franchise?

Amanda Bell June 17, 2025, 5:03 pm

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Teen horror movies were all the rage in the ’90s, and Kevin Williamson‘s 1997 adaptation of Lois Duncan’s I Know What You Did Last Summer was an instant favorite for the subgenre. (At the risk of sinking with a bad pun here, let’s just say audiences were hooked by the star-studded slasher.)

Now, fans of the story will have another reason to hit the theaters this summer as Sony Pictures is releasing a new version of I Know What You Did Last Summer on July 18.

So what is there to know about this new follow-up, and how does it relate to the original film? Here’s a look at all of the details. (Beware that there are spoilers from the previous films ahead!)

It’s the fifth installment in the franchise but canonically counts as the third.

I Know What You Did Last Summer featured some of the biggest names of young Hollywood at the time of its release and was part of a resurgence of teen slashers alongside Scream, Halloween H20, Urban Legend, and others. The film follows a quartet of teenagers — Jennifer Love Hewitt‘s Julie James, Freddie Prinze Jr.‘s Ray Bronson, Sarah Michelle Gellar‘s Helen Shivers, and Ryan Phillippe‘s Barry Cox — in Southport, North Carolina, who run over a man after a night out and decide to ditch the man’s body on the side of the road. A year later, they start receiving notes with the title phrasing on them and are picked off one by one by a hook-wielding murderer. At the end of the pic, they discover the man they hit didn’t die (though he is a murderer) and has been exacting revenge on them. They defeat Ben Willis a.k.a. The Fisherman at the end — though not for good, apparently — and just Julie and Ray survive.

With the box office success of the first film, a sequel very quickly followed. Released in 1998, I Still Know What You Did Last Summer sees the killer come back with a twist. Julie is tricked into going on a tropical getaway with her college roommate, Brandy Norwood‘s Karla, and some friends. Ray only decides to join after they’ve already gone, and soon after, they’re trapped on an island in the middle of a storm as the bodies start stacking up. It turns out, the original killer is not only back in action, but his son has also posed as a friend of Julie’s roommate to help lure them to their doom. After many deaths, Julie and Ray once again survive, along with Karla, and the Fisherman appears to be defeated (with his son dead, too)… until he shows up under Julie’s bed in a closing cliffhanger.

A third film — the direct-to-video 2006 pic I’ll Always Know What You Did Last Summer — brought back the hook-fisted killer (though with a different actor in the role) again, but the other original characters weren’t involved, and the setting moved from the coast to Colorado. Then in 2021, Amazon Prime Video released a series of the same name on streaming that was a completely new iteration of the adaptation. It lasted just one season.

The new film, also titled I Know What You Did Last Summer, serves as a direct sequel to the second, making it the third film in the canonical franchise and the fifth installment of the franchise overall.

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The logline for the new film reads, “When five friends inadvertently cause a deadly car accident, they cover up their involvement and make a pact to keep it a secret rather than face the consequences. A year later, their past comes back to haunt them and they’re forced to confront a horrifying truth: someone knows what they did last summer… And is hell-bent on revenge. As one by one the friends are stalked by a killer, they discover this has happened before, and they turn to two survivors of the legendary Southport Massacre of 1997 for help.”

The new movie will bring back some familiar faces.

Both Jennifer Love Hewitt and Freddie Prinze Jr. reprise their original roles for the new film. In the trailer, which dropped on June 17, we see that both Julie and Ray are back — although potentially not together anymore — and they’re recruited by a new group of victims (slash hit-and-runners) to help stop their hooked attacker from killing off more of them.

Before her casting was official, Hewitt previously told Parade that she only wanted to be a part of the new film if the role was meaty enough: “If I’m going to come back 27 years later, I don’t want to just be in it for five seconds… I want to be able to carve out time to really be in it for people and to have it matter.”

Judging by her prevalence in the teaser — which even features her uttering the now-iconic line, “What are you waiting for?!” — she’ll get plenty of screen time in the new flick.

Sony Pictures

The new cast is filled with fan favorites, too.

Like Scream, Final Destination, and other long-running franchises that have successfully rebooted in recent years, the story is still going to be anchored by a new crew.

The cast includes Madelyn Cline (Outer Banks, Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery) as Danica Richards, Chase Sui Wonders (Bodies Bodies Bodies, The Studio) as Ava Brucks, Jonah Hauer-King (The Little Mermaid, Doctor Who) as Milo Griffin, Tyriq Withers (Tell Me Lies, Him) as Teddy Spencer, Sarah Pidgeon (The Wilds) as Stevie Ward, and Gabbriette Bechtel as Tyler, along with Billy Campbell and Austin Nichols (One Tree Hill).