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The director of 2025's I Know What You Did Last Summer has a simple explanation for why Freddie Prinze Jr. and Jennifer Love Hewitt's characters are still alive
Sometimes, you just gotta throw out continuity when it is inconvenient to the story you're telling.
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Continuity in horror films tends to be a little looser than in most genres. We’ve grown pretty accustomed to seeing the villain die at the end of a movie only to return stronger and more deadly than ever in the inevitable sequel. However, fans probably remember the deaths of Ray and Julie in 1998’s I Still Know What You Did Last Summer, so how are they running around in the upcoming sequel, I Know What You Did Last Summer? Turns out it is a lot of handwaving from the director.
According to Jennifer Kaytin Robinson, who is the director behind the upcoming sequel that shares the same name as the original film (which we’re sure won’t be confusing at all as we await its July 18, 2025 release date), she is simply following in the tradition set by the first two films in the series. “So the way that I’ve approached the franchise is that I feel like those final scenes in the first two movies live outside the canon,” she said in an interview. “Because in the first movie [Julie] gets attacked through the shower, through the glass door, and in the second movie she gets pulled under the bed.”
Ray, played by Freddie Prinze Jr. once again, also presumably met the same fate in I Still Know What You Did Last Summer as he was in the bathroom brushing his teeth as Julie, played by Jennifer Love Hewitt, is dragged under the bed by a killer. “So they’re both alive and well, and what I will say is that we have continued the tradition in our film.”
So it isn’t a continuity error on the part of the writers or the director – it is just them employing the time-tested technique of disregarding what happened before to tell the story they want to tell.
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