Rebooting Horror: Jennifer Love Hewitt and Freddie Prinze Jr. Return in I Know What You Did Last Summer

Jennifer Love Hewitt is back in the limelight as she reprises her iconic role in the highly anticipated reboot of I Know What You Did Last Summer. The new two-and-a-half-minute trailer, released on Tuesday, takes viewers on a chilling journey through the lives of Danica (Madelyn Cline) and her friends, who are reminded of a deadly car accident they were involved in a year earlier.

The trailer opens at Danica’s engagement party in Southport, N.C., where she’s surrounded by her family and friends, including Eva (Chase Sui Wonders), Milo (Jonah Hauer-King), Teddy (Tyriq Withers), and Stevie (Sarah Pidgeon). While opening gifts, Danica comes across an envelope with a card that reads, “I know what you did last summer.” Soon, the group realizes they’re being targeted for the crime they vowed to keep secret.

Desperate for help and answers, they decide to track down people who’ve lived through similar terrors themselves: Ray Bronson (Freddie Prinze Jr.) and Southport’s final girl, Julie James (Hewitt). “You survived this once. We need your help,” Eva tells Julie.

As the trailer progresses, we watch as a fisherman’s bloody pursuit of each member of the clique intensifies, before finally ending on a chilling close-up of Julie, as she defiantly utters her iconic line, “What are you waiting for?”

The 2025 reboot of I Know What You Did Last Summer is based on the 1997 film of the same name, which starred Hewitt, Prinze, Sarah Michelle Gellar, and Ryan Phillippe. The original film focused on a close-knit group of friends who found themselves suffering the consequences of a hit-and-run they committed and covered up in the summer of 1996. The reboot follows a similar premise but with updated characters and settings.

Eagle-eyed fans will notice additional nods to the original film in the latest trailer. At one point, Danica is in the same Croaker Queen pageant hall where Helen Shivers (Gellar) begins her famous chase scene with the fisherman. While bringing Gellar back wasn’t exactly possible—her character dies in the 1997 film—involvement from Hewitt and Prinze was crucial for the reboot’s director and cowriter, Jennifer Kaytin Robinson.

“There was no movie without them,” Robinson said during a screening of the trailer on June 14. The Someone Great and Do Revenge filmmaker pitched the reboot’s premise to Hewitt and Prinze directly. From there, they worked closely on developing their characters today.

“This movie is about how trauma informs and shapes and changes you underneath all the fun scary gags,” Robinson revealed. “It was about figuring out exactly what these people would be like today, later in adulthood, having lived with what happened to them for as many years as they have.”

For Robinson, paying homage to the original film was crucial. “We never wanted to do anything for lack of a better word, ‘gratuitous,’ like for the sake of doing it,” she said. “The way that we have built the lore of, especially the first movie, into this movie, allowed us to play with things from the original in a way that felt like it was a part of their story as well, rather than it being on top. It is very much woven within the fabric of this new installment.”