‘Buffy’s Sarah Michelle Gellar Makes Brief Appearance in New Revival Trailer
The ’90s are alive and slashing. While Sarah Michelle Gellar is dusting off wooden stakes for the Buffy the Vampire Slayer revival, in which she’ll be guiding a new Chosen One, that “legacy-character-now-serving-as-mentor” vibe has already carried over into another franchise that helped make Gellar a household name during the late ’90s.
Sony Pictures has dropped the first trailer for I Know What You Did Last Summer (2025). Serving as a legacy sequel in the same vein as Scream (2022) and Halloween (2018), the film positions franchise veterans Jennifer Love Hewitt and Freddie Prinze Jr. as seasoned survivors helping another batch of unlucky teenagers who commit a deadly hit-and-run.
Fans of the original films, I Know What You Did Last Summer (1997) and I Still Know What You Did Last Summer (1998), will know exactly what follows: twelve months of nail-biting guilt and then a mysterious man in a rain-slicker with a razor-sharp hook as his weapon.
Watch the trailer for I Know What You Did Last Summer (2025) from Sony Entertainment:
Related: Why the ‘Buffy: Resurrection’ Trailer Has Us Excited for the Upcoming Reboot
Director Jennifer Kaytin Robinson keeps the setup familiar: five friends cover up the accident, swear secrecy, and learn that someone already knows.
Unfortunately, though, with Gellar’s doomed beauty queen Helen Shivers having been killed off in the original 1997 film, there’s very little chance of seeing her return. Although, if the upcoming Scream 7 can resurrect long-dead characters, never say never.
“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,” the official synopsis for I Know What You Did Last Summer (2025) reads. “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.
Back on the Buffy front, writers Nora and Lilla Zuckerman and director Chloé Zhao are building the new Buffyverse installment, with Gellar sliding into a watcher-style part, as well as one of the new show’s EPs. That symmetry—Gellar as mentor in Sunnydale, Hewitt and Prinze as mentors in Southport—gives fans of both franchises a neat through-line.
I Know What You Did Last Summer (2025) hits theaters July 18. The Buffy revival is still building its stake-sharpening schedule.
Which are you most excited for, the Buffy series or I Know What You Did Last Summer (2025)? Let us know in the comments down below!
