The Downfall Of The I Know What You Did Last Summer Franchise Can Be Traced Back To One Moment

The "I Know What You Did Last Summer" franchise started when the first movie (which is based on a 1973 YA novel by Lois Duncan) premiered in 1997, armed with a perfectly serviceable hooked killer mystery and a cast stacked with teen stars and heartthrobs from Jennifer Love Hewitt and Sarah Michelle Gellar to Ryan Phillippe, Freddie Prinze Jr., and Bridgette Wilson. However, the nascent film series ground down to a halt after just three movies. The 2021 Prime Video show largely failed to breathe new life in the "wronged hit-and-run victim is now a serial killer" premise, and while it remains to be seen whether the 2025 reboot movie will become a horror box office hit, the overall trend of the franchise certainly isn't pointing skywards. If you ask me, this is because "I Know What You Did Last Summer" made the mistake of trying to become a franchise too quickly.

It's understandable. Horror movies thrive on sequels, and most little slasher movies secretly aspire to become sprawling multimedia series when they grow up. However, even the best horror franchises of all time will deliver a lemon before long. The way this is done is crucial. Franchises that come up with their own spins on "Jason X" or "Leprechaun in the Hood" risk running off the rails. Still, there's even a worse version of handling things, and it's to simply fast-track boring sequels without novel ideas. This is what the "I Know What You Did Last Summer" movies tried, and it's easy to pinpoint the exact moment the franchise went off the rails: 1998's "I Still Know What You Did Last Summer," which is just about as boring as a slasher movie can be, and has the 8% Rotten Tomatoes tomatometer score to prove it.

"I Know What You Did Last Summer" is a perfectly fun slasher with a clever mystery premise, but when it turned out to be a hit and Sequel Time came knocking, the wannabe franchise faced two problems: They were out of source material, and the sequel needed to make its way in theaters for the very next summer. As "I Still Know What You Did Last Summer" screenwriter Trey Callaway told Bloody Flicks, this made the sequel a bit of a rush job: 

"There was definitely some urgency attached to the job. The studio was eager to get it rolling ASAP in order to capitalize on the success of 'IKWYDLS'. My memory's a little fuzzy on all the details at this point, but I'd say from the time they bought my pitch to the time the film went into production was around six months."

The sequel is a pale retread of the original, which wasn't exactly groundbreaking itself. Somehow, things got even worse with 2006's "I'll Always Know What You Did Last Summer," which attempted to revive the franchise by turning central villain Ben Willis (Don Shanks) into a supernatural foe á la Jason Voorhees, but forgot to wrap this pivot into something resembling a captivating story. It belly-flopped to the tune of a 0% Rotten Tomatoes score. 

Isolated from the movie surrounding it, the undead killer reveal of the direct-to-video threequel wasn't the franchise's "jumping the shark" moment as much as it was a pretty fun idea, as grasping at straws goes. However, the "Last Summer" series has been running on fumes for so long that unless the 2025 film manages to enliven things and be an actually decent movie, it has little chance of reviving the hook-wielding franchise.