The I Know What You Did Last Summer franchise is a peculiar beast. Think about it. First of all, it never really got started. I consider the foundation of a horror franchise to be the movies that got released at a relatively steady clip (generally one or two years apart) before the series went on hiatus, then took a sharp turn into legacy sequels, direct-to-video sequels, reboots, and the like. For Friday the 13th, that foundation is eight movies. A Nightmare on Elm Street had five. Scream and Child’s Play were founded on solid trilogies. The Conjuring Universe is at eight and counting (and that’s if you skip Curse of La Llorona, which I am loath to do). And what did I Know What You Did Last Summer get? A measly two.
Not only did it fail to get started, it also kind of failed to get going. After the original two movies (the first of which is based on a 1973 young adult novel by Lois Duncan), which were directly in continuity with one another, it had a direct-to-video sequel eight years later and a short-lived television reboot 15 years after that. And yet, like any good horror villain, it refuses to die. With a 2025 legacy sequel coming our way, I thought it was high time to take a look at this misbegotten but indefatigable multimedia series and see just what we can make of it, by ranking its efforts from worst to best.
#4 I Know What You Did Last Summer (2021)
It makes sense that the world was not kind to this one-season Prime Video reboot. When the last entry in a franchise that anyone remotely cared about was more than 20 years earlier, and then you pull a big swing like this, more or less completely removing everything about the characters and premise that was compelling, it’s not going to go well. And that’s not even mentioning the fact that this is an ugly and incompetently-made series, with an outright disdain for the 180-degree line that makes the mere act of watching it feel like aesthetic water torture if you care about film craft even a little bit.
Really, the only thing that it had going for it was the fact that it was set and shot in Hawai’i. In addition to giving it a really grounded sense of place, it also evoked the specificity of the fact that the original movie was set in North Carolina.
#3 I’ll Always Know What You Did Last Summer (2006)
I honestly admire the extravagantly goofy choice to have original killer Ben Willis (Muse Watson in the original movies, Don Shanks in this one) return as a ghost who has become some sort of cross-country specter of previous-summer-themed vengeance. However, this direct-to-video sequel that is otherwise unrelated to anything else in the franchise is bland as all get out and boasts the weakest acting of the franchise. This is somewhat forgivable, given the fact that the original director was fired and the new director had to scramble to get everything together in just two weeks. And that original director was Joe Chappelle, who might have the actual worst filmography of any horror director (Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers, Phantoms, parts of Hellraiser: Bloodline), so we probably dodged a bullet. This could have been even lower!
#2 I Still Know What You Did Last Summer (1998)
I Still Know What You Did Last Summer is immensely, deliriously, outrageously stupid. Mileage will vary on this movie, but if you read my paean to the stupidity of I Still Know What You Did Last Summer from two years ago, you know my mileage is fully “Rascal Flatts in a Prius.” I’m getting that hybrid car highway mileage, baby, and I’m riding it all night long.
That said, it’s obviously not the best entry in the series. As charismatic as Brandy is, the new characters around Ray (Freddie Prinze Jr.) and Julie (Jennifer Love Hewitt) don’t hold a candle to the duo’s original friends in terms of complexity or entertainment value. And the choice (probably made by necessity) to keep the two surviving characters apart for basically the entire span of the story results in the movie completely deflating every time it has to cut back to whatever boring shit Ray is up to.
#1 I Know What You Did Last Summer (1997)
I know, I know, it’s boring when the obvious choice is up top. But sometimes the original is simply the best, and you just have to deal with it. As I’ve already mentioned, the specificity of its setting in a North Carolina fishing town is unique and interesting for a slick, post-Scream slasher. And while the script doesn’t boast the Kevin Williamson-esque touches of his other work from the 1990s (it was written before Scream, and it shows), it’s a solid meat-and-potatoes slasher movie with a fun killer M.O. (hook-wielding murderers are so popular in urban legends for a reason) and a group of friends that includes Ryan Phillippe and Sarah Michelle Gellar at the heights of their powers.