Jennifer Love Hewitt Is Ready To Return To Her Best Role, Sequel Confirmed
Jennifer Love Hewitt is in talks to join a revival of I Know What You Did Last Summer at Sony Pictures.
The I Know What You Did Last Summer franchise is being revived at Sony Pictures, and original star Jennifer Love Hewitt is in discussions to return to the series. According to Deadline, the 1990s slasher series is receiving a new sequel, which is currently in development. It seems that Sony noticed that Paramount Pictures recently had enormous success with a soft reboot of the Scream franchise, and decided that it could revive I Know What You Did Last Summer in much the same way.
The original I Know What You Did Last Summer featured an impressive array of 1990s stars, including Jennifer Love Hewitt, Freddie Prinze Jr., Ryan Phillipe, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Johnny Galecki, and Anne Heche, which makes it a prime studio resource to latch onto current nostalgia trends. The 1997 film involved four high school students who drunkenly hit and run an unknown man after graduation, and after attempting to cover up the crime, find themselves stalked by a hook-handed killer. The movie spawned two sequels (only one of which starred Jennifer Love Hewitt) and is generally considered to have helped kick off the return of slasher movies in the 1990s, along with Scream.
That is not a coincidence: both I Know What You Did Last Summer and Scream were written by Kevin Williamson, who also created Dawson’s Creek, The Faculty, and most pop culture of the 1990s. Jennifer Love Hewitt served as the primary lead of the former franchise (much like Neve Campbell in Scream), while Sarah Michelle Gellar made the leap over to starring in Scream 2. To make even more connections, I Know What You Did Last Summer star Freddie Prinze Jr. is also married to Gellar, with whom he starred in several live-action Scooby-Doo movies.
While I Know What You Did Last Summer stars Jennifer Love Hewitt and Freddie Prinze Jr. are not yet confirmed to return for the sequel, it seems like the time is ripe for another slasher revival. The 2022 Scream legacy sequel was both commercially successful and critically acclaimed (as well as managing to find another batch of telegenic youths like Jenna Ortega to terrorize), making it almost inevitable that studios will try to replicate it. The Final Destination reboot is reportedly already in development and we are sure that Urban Legend: Legends Never Die is soon to follow.
The I Know What You Did Last Summer revival will be directed by Jennifer Kaytin Robinson, who developed the idea with Leah McKendrick, who will write the script. Robinson is best known for co-writing and directing the Netflix sleeper hit Do Revenge, which co-starred Maya Hawke, Camila Mendes, and, because there’s always a connection, Sarah Michelle Gellar.
While I Know What You Did Last Summer was never quite as meta-aware as the Scream franchise, it will likely follow the same kind of conscious passing of the torch to a new generation as the 2022 Scream did. We can only pray that contract negotiations go well and we get to see Jennifer Love Hewitt confronting the demons of her past, once again.
