A Scream-style copycat killer stalks the I Know What You Did Last Summer trailer

Jennifer Love Hewitt and Freddie Prinze Jr. return to mentor the next generation on July 18.

By Mary Kate Carr  |  June 17, 2025 | 10:58am
Photo: Brook Rushton/Sony Pictures Entertainment
Film News I Know What You Did Last Summer
A Scream-style copycat killer stalks the I Know What You Did Last Summer trailer

The next-gen soft reboot stars of an iconic horror property need advice from the Final Girl (and Guy) on how to survive attacks from a copycat killer. That’s the plot of Scream (2022), but apparently also the plot of I Know What You Did Last Summer, the legacyquel to the 1997 teen horror hit. (Some things never change: they were calling the original a Scream clone back in the day, too.) Jennifer Love Hewitt and Freddie Prinze Jr. return in the 2025 I Know What You Did Last Summer trailer to mentor a new generation of hit-and-run perpetrators. Absent, of course, is Prinze Jr.’s wife Sarah Michelle Gellar because, in her own words, “I am dead.”

In her place is a new crop of young, beautiful people, including Madelyn Cline (Outer Banks), Chase Sui Wonders (The Studio), Jonah Hauer-King (The Little Mermaid), Tyriq Withers (Him), and Sarah Pidgeon (Tiny Beautiful Things). Per the 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.”

If you’re familiar with the original movie, you know that the killer’s revenge is rarely limited to just killing the young people who covered up the deadly car accident. The same rules apply in the I Know What You Did Last Summer trailer, wherein Madelyn Cline’s fiancé is gruesomely executed to punish her sins. But is Julie (Hewitt) caught in the crosshairs of the killer just by association with the new kids, or does this murderer have a connection to the Southport Massacre beyond his copycat costume? All will be revealed when the film premieres July 18. 

 
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