I Know What You Did Last Summer sequel director talks the survival of Jennifer Love Hewitt and Freddie Prinze Jr.’s characters

There’s a new sequel to the 1997 slasher I Know What You Did Last Summer (watch it HERE) and its 1998 follow-up I Still Know What You Did Last Summer (watch that one HERE) coming our way from director Jennifer Kaytin Robinson (Do Revenge), aiming for a July 18 theatrical release. Jennifer Love Hewitt, who played heroine Julie James in the first two films, and Freddie Prinze Jr., who was Julie’s boyfriend Ray Bronson in those films, are reprising their roles – and during a conversation with Entertainment Weekly, Robinson seemed to confirm that the ending of I Still Know What You Did Last Summer, like the ending of its predecessor, was just a nightmare. Julie and Ray were not really being attacked by the Fisherman (again).

Robinson said, “So the way that I’ve approached the franchise is that I feel like those final scenes in the first two movies live outside the canon, because in the first movie she gets attacked through the shower, through the glass door, and in the second movie, she gets pulled under the bed. So they’re both alive and well, and what I will say is that we have continued the tradition in our film.“

Robinson is directing the film from a screenplay by Leah McKendrick (M.F.A.), which has received some rewrites from Robinson and journalist Sam Lansky. McKendrick told Collider a while back that the new sequel will reckon with “some big ideas about hero and villain, right and wrong, how your skeletons come back to haunt you. And in the age of the internet and the age where fame is such a revered concept, the creation of TikTok and social media, who is Julie James in a world where there are no secrets anymore?“ McKendrick also said that when she went in to pitch her take to Sony, the most important things they wanted to hear about were “the accident, the event that kicks it off, and who the killer is.“

Here’s the new sequel’s synopsis: 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. As you can tell from the synopsis, Hewitt and Prinze are not the leads this time around. They’re joined in the cast by Madelyn Cline (Outer Banks), Chase Sui Wonders (Bodies Bodies Bodies), Jonah Hauer-King (The Little Mermaid), Tyriq Withers (Atlanta), Sarah Pidgeon (Tiny Beautiful Things), Billy Campbell (The Rocketeer), model / musician Gabbriette Bechtel (making her feature film acting debut), Austin Nichols (The Day After Tomorrow), Lola Tung (The Summer I Turned Pretty), and Nicholas Alexander Chavez (Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menéndez Story).

Prinze told Entertainment Weekly, “Catching up with Ray, you see how that has shaped him into the position he’s in now. He loves his town and not everyone else does, in his view, and he’s a little grumpier with the way the world has treated him since [the 1997 Southport Massacre]. So he has gone through a lot, and I don’t know if he’s dealt with it the way the modern man deals with stuff, you know what I mean? He’s a guy from the ’90s like myself, so I think he’s probably bottled up a lot more of those feelings we’ve talked about.” He went on to reveal, “Ray has a bar that he runs. It’s kind of where he’s at in his life now. He’s not the active fisherman that he thought he was going to be. He’s managing and owning a spot of his own and trying to keep it afloat.“

Robinson added, “I came to this originally wanting to dig into: if this thing had happened to you, how would that shape you, and what person do you become after it? So really wanting to look at both Ray and Julie and say, ‘Okay, how did this thing shape both of them and where would they be today?’ … Without giving too much away, they both moved through the trauma and became fully realized adults, and I think had very different ways of dealing with what happened to them. So that is definitely the main source of conflict between them: how do you move through this? And now that people have way more tools, do you use all the tools, or do you not? Do you push it down and repress it and just keep moving? (The new film is) about both Ray and Julie finding catharsis through helping the younger cast in this film. I think they both have a lot of emotional stuff that they’ve kind of put Band-Aids on, and those Band-Aids are ripped off by our younger cast, and this movie is definitely about them. Each of them has a person in the younger cast that they are connected to, and it is about them helping all five of these kids move through this. And through doing that, I think they actually are able to find closure and release and are able to move forward in a way that they never would have had they not experienced this with this younger group.“

Are you looking forward to catching up with Jennifer Love Hewitt / Julie James and Freddie Prinze Jr. / Ray Bronson in the new I Know What You Did Last Summer sequel? Let us know by leaving a comment below… and take a look at these new images while you’re scrolling down:

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