I Know What You Did Last Summer sequel director tried to bring back Sarah Michelle Gellar

There’s a new sequel to the 1997 slasher I Know What You Did Last Summer (watch it HERE) and its 1998 follow-up I Still Know What You Did Last Summer (watch that one HERE) coming our way from director Jennifer Kaytin Robinson (Do Revenge), aiming for a July 18 theatrical release. Jennifer Love Hewitt, who played heroine Julie James in the first two films, and Freddie Prinze Jr., who was Julie’s boyfriend Ray Bronson in those films, are reprising their roles – and during a conversation with Entertainment Weekly, Robinson revealed that she also tried to convince Sarah Michelle Gellar to be in the film, even though her character was killed in the first movie!

Robinson is directing the film from a screenplay by Leah McKendrick (M.F.A.), which has received some rewrites from Robinson and journalist Sam Lansky. McKendrick told Collider a while back that the new sequel will reckon with “some big ideas about hero and villain, right and wrong, how your skeletons come back to haunt you. And in the age of the internet and the age where fame is such a revered concept, the creation of TikTok and social media, who is Julie James in a world where there are no secrets anymore?“ McKendrick also said that when she went in to pitch her take to Sony, the most important things they wanted to hear about were “the accident, the event that kicks it off, and who the killer is.“

Here’s the new sequel’s 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. As you can tell from the synopsis, Hewitt and Prinze are not the leads this time around. They’re joined in the cast by Madelyn Cline (Outer Banks), Chase Sui Wonders (Bodies Bodies Bodies), Jonah Hauer-King (The Little Mermaid), Tyriq Withers (Atlanta), Sarah Pidgeon (Tiny Beautiful Things), Billy Campbell (The Rocketeer), model / musician Gabbriette Bechtel (making her feature film acting debut), Austin Nichols (The Day After Tomorrow), Lola Tung (The Summer I Turned Pretty), and Nicholas Alexander Chavez (Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menéndez Story).

At one time, Robinson’s Do Revenge star Camila Mendes was attached to the project, but had to drop out to work on Masters of the Universe. It seems Mendes was replaced by Wonders – and Robinson confirmed to Entertainment Weekly that she also tried to get Mendes’s Do Revenge co-star Maya Hawke into the movie, but couldn’t work out the schedule. Gellar was another Do Revenge cast member that the director couldn’t get into this movie.

Robinson said, “I actually tried to get Maya Hawke, and we couldn’t work it out with schedules. I mean, the big one (was Sarah Michelle Gellar). I tried relentlessly, and she’s dead. I tried, okay? I harassed her! But she is dead. I tried to pitch some crazy s— too. I was like, ‘What if it’s like you weren’t dead and you’re actually alive, but in hiding?’ And Sarah’s like, ‘I was on ice. I was the most dead a person could be. You can see my frozen body.’ I was like, ‘Yeah, but what if?’ And she said, ‘I am dead. I am Sarah Dead Gellar.’“

I’m glad Gellar stood her ground on that one because, yeah, her character was clearly deceased in the original movie.

What do you think of the director trying to get Sarah Michelle Gellar into the new I Know What You Did Last Summer sequel? Let us know by leaving a comment below.

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