I Know What You Did Final Summer season director and co-writer Jennifer Kaytin Robinson has spoken in regards to the significance of its legacy characters. The 2025 film is the fourth feature-length installment within the slasher franchise, which follows teams of teenagers being focused by a slicker-wearing, hook-wielding killer. The upcoming I Know What You Did Final Summer season encompasses a new crop of teenagers being focused for a vehicular manslaughter they lined up the 12 months earlier than, aided by returning survivors Julie James (Jennifer Love Hewitt) and Ray Bronson (Freddie Prinze Jr.), who had been central to the unique 1997 film and its 1998 sequel.
ScreenRant‘s personal Brandon Zachary was in attendance at an I Know What You Did Final Summer season trailer launch occasion on Saturday, the place members of the solid and crew spoke in regards to the film throughout a Q&A afterward. Through the dialog, Robinson shared that she “labored actually carefully” with each returning stars whereas creating the story, ensuring they crafted “variations of the character[s] that felt proper to them.”
She revealed that the film will discover how the trauma of their first two battles with the fisherman killer have formed Julie and Ray’s lives as adults. This may enable the film to have “an actual emotional undercurrent“ beneath the enjoyable storyline and “nice kill sequences.” Learn Robinson’s full quote under:
I imply, there was no film with out them. [I] type of got here to each of them, advised them what I needed to do, and gave them the spiel of like, because of this I feel that is enjoyable now. For this reason this film ought to exist now. And we labored actually carefully. I labored with each Jen and Freddie actually carefully on ensuring that it felt like variations of the character that felt proper to them. And so it was a variety of conversations. It was a variety of speaking, as a result of there may be like, whereas this film is admittedly, actually enjoyable and it has a variety of nice kill sequences, there’s a actual emotional undercurrent to it.
And like we had been speaking about how traumatized would Julie James be? Like, you’d be traumatized, and so they each could be traumatized. And this film is about how trauma type of informs and shapes and adjustments you beneath the entire very enjoyable screaming gags. So yeah, it was about determining precisely what these individuals could be like right this moment, later in maturity, having lived with what occurred to them for as a few years as they’ve.
What This Means For I Know What You Did Final Summer season
The Legacy Sequel May Cement A Main Horror Franchise
The truth that Julie and Ray are returning to sq. off towards the I Know What You Did Final Summer season fisherman yet one more time after almost 30 years is already exceptional. In doing so, they be part of a heap of legendary legacy characters who’ve returned for main sequels in recent times, together with Bludworth (Tony Todd) in 2025’s Ultimate Vacation spot Bloodlines, Dewey (David Arquette), Sidney (Neve Campbell), and Gale (Courteney Cox) in 2022’s Scream, and Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) in 2018’s Halloween.
The celebrities’ most up-to-date appearances of their respective franchises previous to these legacy sequels had been 2011’s Ultimate Vacation spot 5, 2011’s Scream 4, and 2002’s Halloween: Resurrection.
Particularly if the returning characters are as rigorously calibrated as Robinson guarantees, 2025’s I Know What You Did Final Summer season may lastly cement the collection as a significant horror franchise. Though the primary two motion pictures had been financially profitable, a completely fleshed-out franchise by no means materialized. It solely continued in spurts over the following many years, with a 2006 direct-to-video standalone sequel that earned a uncommon 0% rating on Rotten Tomatoes and a short-lived 2021 Prime Video tv reboot that solely lasted for one eight-episode season.
Having The Sequel Be About Trauma Makes Sense
Usually, using the phrase “trauma” when describing the driving pressure of a contemporary horror film makes it sound to me like a generic “elevated horror” piece, given what number of horror motion pictures in recent times have particularly been metaphors for grief and trauma. Nevertheless, using this method is smart for legacy horror sequels like I Know What You Did Final Summer season. Returning characters are going to essentially be formed by their previous experiences, so hopefully Robinson and her co-writer Sam Lansky have discovered a strategy to rigorously wield that factor in a manner that feels recent and thrilling.
I Know What You Did Final Summer season
- Launch Date
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July 18, 2025
- Runtime
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100 minutes
- Director
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Jennifer Kaytin Robinson
- Writers
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Jennifer Kaytin Robinson, Sam Lansky
- Producers
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Neal H. Moritz
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Madelyn Cline
Danica Richards
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Chase Sui Wonders
Ava Brucks
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Jonah Hauer-King
Milo Griffin
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Tyriq Withers
Teddy Spencer