'I Know What You Did Last Summer' (2025) Twist Ending Explained by Director
WARNING: SPOILERS AHEAD!
The 2025 reboot of I Know What You Did Last Summer is now in theaters, and director Jennifer Kaytin Robinson is addressing the movie’s divisive twist.
In the film, similar to the 1997 original 1997, a group of friends are terrorized by a stalker who knows about a gruesome incident from their past.
But the director revealed that she knew not everyone would love this new movie’s ending.
Keep reading to find out more…
In the 2025 movie, one of the film’s killers is revealed to be Ray Bronson, the character Freddie Prinze Jr. originated in the first film.
His character’s motive is that he’s angry the town has erased the 1997 massacre to promote tourism, so he reminds everyone of the fisherman’s murder spree by helping his employee Stevie (Sarah Pidgeon) get revenge on her friends who caused a deadly car accident.
Julie James (Jennifer Love Hewitt), who is now a psychology professor and ex-wife of Ray, have a confrontation at the end of the film. When Ray is about to kill Julie, he’s shot and killed from behind with a harpoon gun fired by Ava (Chase Sui Wonders).
“Do I think people might not like it? Sure,” Jennifer admitted to People.
“But I think for me, it was always about if you’re going to do this, take a swing. Just take a swing. Listen, if not everybody likes it, that’s okay. Because I think we need more movies that you can argue about in the car on the ride home.”
Freddie said he and the director “talked a lot about reasons why” Ray snapped into a killer and “what trauma can do and how the same trauma can affect people so differently.”
“It can make you or it can break you. And what happens if it breaks you? What does that do? How do you react to situations? There’s going to definitely be people that freak out. But I have to make this movie because I believe in the choices that the character’s making, not necessarily the ones that other people may see as what they want, what their wish fulfillment is. I have to see it and believe it.”
I love what they’ve done with Ray. Jen Robinson and [co-writer] Sam Lansky put so much time into Ray and Julie, and they’re such a driving force in this film that people will get what they’re looking for out of these characters. You’ll get to see who Ray was, and you’ll get to see who Ray is, and you’ll get to figure out what happened in between,” Freddie added.
Jennifer also admitted that she was surprised by the twist at first, btu “I think it makes sense. If you really look at who he was in the movies, it makes sense. He was always this tortured, dark kind of kid who wasn’t really sure about how he felt about Southport and his place there and what that all meant, and he carried his own stuff, obviously from the road that night and everything.”
“So even though I was shocked at first [by the twist],” she went on to say, “when I went back and really looked at it and put those pieces together for myself, I think it felt like it made sense. When Julie realizes that in the movie, I tried not to play the shock of it so that even in my small part in this, people would be able to hopefully go back and be like, ‘She was not shocked by this. Why was she not shocked by it?’ You know what I mean? If you really put the pieces together, I get it.”
The director went on to say: “The thought of this thing that happened to Julie and Ray pushing both of them in such different directions was really interesting to me.”
“And I did like that Harvey Dent arc of ‘you die the hero or you live long enough to become the villain.’ Because I do think that calcified trauma — especially in men who aren’t dealing with their emotions — can change you in really profound ways that you don’t even realize,” she added.
“To me, that was always the thing that was interesting. I went to Sony and I was like, ‘I want to do it, but I only want to do it if I can do this.’ They said yes. I went to Freddie and kind of pitched him why I felt the character would end up here, and then I pitched him the movie, and he was in, and we were off to the races.”
Find out why you definitely can’t miss the incredible end credits scene.