The Legacy Gang’s All Here in First Trailer for I Know What You Did Last Summer

By Jim Vorel  |  April 22, 2025 | 9:47am
Movies News I Know What You Did Last Summer
The Legacy Gang’s All Here in First Trailer for I Know What You Did Last Summer
Listen to this article

The legacy sequel machine eventually comes for us all, and now it appears it’s the turn of I Know What You Did Last Summer to get a belated follow-up–with the same name as the original–that ropes the surviving cast members back into a plot connected to the first film. It joins the epic pantheon of 2018’s Halloween and 2022’s Scream as “films that now need a year included in order to know which one you’re freakin’ talking about.” The film, from Do Revenge writer-director Jennifer Kaytin Robinson, hits U.S. theaters on July 18, 2025 and released its first trailer today. The synopsis is as follows, although surely if you’ve seen I Know What You Did Last Summer, you can’t help but know exactly what this will entail:

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.

So yeah, that’s definitely I Know What You Did Last Summer, a franchise whose original 1997 film has always been tied at the hip in the pop-cultural consciousness with Scream, even though I Know What You Did really has more in common with vintage ’80s slashers such as My Bloody Valentine, wherein an instance of original sin is punished years later by a returning boogeyman. This new version stars Madelyn Cline, who viewers may remember from Rian Johnson’s Glass Onion, alongside Chase Sui Wonders of Bodies Bodies Bodies. And of course, it’s bringing back the old faces to rope in those millennial and Gen X viewers: Freddie Prinze Jr. and Jennifer Love Hewitt–“Julie James” herself–both appear prominently in the trailer. Now taking bets as to whether they participated in two-day shoots for a glorified cameo, or are actually involved tightly in this plot. Of note: The film appears entirely unrelated to the I Know What You Did Last Summer TV series that ran for one season on Amazon Prime Video in 2021.

Check out the trailer, and its admittedly gnarly harpoon sequence, below, as we brace for the film’s arrival on July 18, 2025.

 
Join the discussion...