How ‘I Know What You Did Last Summer’ Director Jennifer Kaytin Robinson Rebooted the Millennial Cult Classic for Gen Z

I Know What You Did Last Summer director Jennifer Kaytin Robinson doesn’t want to see a cell phone on a movie screen.

“I’ve done this in all of my movies, for better or worse. I don’t like social media and phones,” says the 37-year-old director. “I don’t want to look at a phone screen. I don’t want to see you text-messaging. I just don’t care.”

There is something inherently ridiculous in asking audiences to leave their plentiful screens at home to go to a theater to watch a big screen, only to be confronted with a character incessantly looking at small screens. Still, when those characters are a gaggle of 20-somethings being stalked by a hook-wielding and slicker-wearing homicidal maniac, there is surely cause for some cellular activity.  

“Would all of these people be texting all the time? Sure. But I don’t care.” Robinson says, refreshingly doubling down. And anyway, she counters, “As someone who now knows a lot of Gen Z actors, their phones are always dead. They are always on their phone, and they are never on their phone. They have 400 unread text messages. They only voice note.”

Phones or not, with I Know What You Did Last Summer, out this Friday, Robinson has been tasked with capturing Gen Z onscreen and their hopeful attention at the movie theater by updating a touchstone of Millennial cinema.

1997’s I Know What You Did Last Summer starred Freddie Prinze Jr., Sarah Michelle Gellar, Jennifer Love Hewitt and Ryan Phillippe, the Mount Rushmore of 90s teen movie icons. After committing a hit-and-run and swearing each other to secrecy, this quartet is stalked by The Fisherman, a man wielding a killer hook.

Robinson first saw that movie at the age of 9 when a babysitter brought her to the theater and was likely never hired again. And while her mom was “really, really mad obviously,” the experience proved formative. “I am a true child of that time. I could lie and say that I came up on really important films, like film bro films, but I was forged in ’90s cinema,” says the director. From Dawson’s Creek to Scream, Robinson was reared on writer Kevin Williamson’s dialogue, and her 2022 movie Do Revenge paid homage to canonicals ’90s films like Cruel Intentions and Clueless.

It was while she was in post on Do Revenge that Sony Pictures and Neal Moritz’ Original Films approached Robinson about the prospect of rebooting I Know What You Did Last Summer. She wasn’t worried if the central story could translate for a 2025 audience, saying, “The core idea is completely evergreen. At any point, in any time, someone making a grave mistake and then paying for it can work as a story.” The larger challenge would be towing the line reboot between appealing to fans of the ’90s films and reinvention.

Too much of the former and “it alienates a new audience, because they feel like they’re on the outside of an inside joke,” says Robinson. Too much of the latter, and audiences will start wondering why they didn’t just make an original horror film. Says the director of the potentially maddening tightrope walk, “People are going to have thoughts and feelings and opinions, and that’s not a negative.”

The 2025 update sees a now post-collegiate group of high school friends coming together under the auspices of an engagement party, only to end the night by inadvertently causing an anonymous driver to nosedive off a cliff. After making the inevitably fatal decision to cover up the accident, the group is later hunted down by The Fisherman and calls upon the help of survivors Ray (Prinze) and Julie (Hewitt) as pseudo-mentors.

While the characters of the original film were still in their teens, filmmakers chose to age up the cast for the reboot. “What’s actually at stake is much more nebulous [in high school] than it is when you’re in your mid 20s,” says co-writer Sam Lansky. If the 1997 movie starred the bold-faced names of young adult ’90s movies, then the 2025 cast, which includes The Studio stand-out Chase Sui Wonders, an alum of Gen Z horror comedy Bodies Bodies Bodies, and Outer Banks breakout Madelyn Cline, could be poised to do the same.

As for generational markers, one character is a host of a true-crime podcast (played by model/singer/general “it” girl Gabbriette) and there is plenty of therapy-speak about trauma and self-care, with a character even name-checking the Instagram famous self-help title The Body Keeps the Score. The girls call each other “diva,” both with and without irony.

All the same, Robinson and Lansky weren’t combing TikTok for research. “That is extremely just how Jen and I talk,” says Lansky. “I am, at my heart, a Gen Z, brain rot girlie, despite being an aging Millennial.”

I Know What You Did Last Summer isn’t alone in studios tapping the well of Millennial nostalgia. The Lindsay Lohan-fronted Freaky Friday sequel is heading into theaters later this summer, while a Devil Wear Prada follow-up is currently in production. Earlier this summer, the $1 billion live-action Lilo & Stitch became a breakout hit thanks to catering early aughts IP to Zoomers. (18 and 24 year-olds making up 32 percent of the non-family audience, followed by 33 percent between ages 25 to 34.).

The interest is there, but the question becomes who will be the ones to make these movies. Amongst her age cohort, Robinson’s career is a singular one. After creating a critically adored television series, MTV’s Sweet/Vicious, she jumped into features with 2019’s Someone Great and Do Revenge, both original films for Netflix. (She isn’t a complete stranger to IP, having co-written Marvel entry Thor: Love & Thunder.)

The well-trodden path for Millennial filmmakers has most often been through the indie space, where a festival film begets larger budgets behind studio gates. But, as of the past couple of years, more filmmakers are staying away from the studio system (see: Celine Song, Ari Aster), while risk-averse studios are looking for known quantities in the director’s chair.

“I want there to be more filmmakers, especially indie-leaning filmmakers, who want to and are excited about and understand the assignment of commerciality and making commercial films. They can still feel original but are meant to be commercial. And I want studios to bring up filmmakers so that we can find that middle again,” says Robinson. “I miss the middle.” After all, that middle is where I Know What You Did Last Summer and many of the beloved films from ’90s and early ’00s once sat.

Robinson fully grasped the anticipation for another I Know What You Did Last Summer when the trailer dropped online two months ago and traveled far and wide across social media. But she knows some people will inevitably leave her movie with unmet expectations. (Reviews from critics have been soft). She says, “I unfortunately know that not everyone is going to like this because we took swings. But I’m really proud of those swings, and what I hope is that even if you don’t like it, you can be like, ‘Huh, cool swing.’”

And to Robinson, any conversation surrounding movies is a positive when it comes to getting young audiences to the movie theater. She points to Ryan Coogler’s Sinners and Song’s The Materialists as two films that stirred interest online and in media that then pushed people to go to the movie theater. She says, “Having discourse, good or bad, it doesn’t really matter, just talk about [movies] and make them feel like they have a place in culture. Everybody wants to be a part of culture.”