I Know What You Did Last Summer was made into a teen slasher movie in the late 1990s, and Goodman said when remaking the story as a TV series that she was a fan of those the movie and its sequels, and the Lois Duncan novel of the same name. Taking aspects from both gave Goodman the details she needed to make what she described as “an anthology series,” but unfortunately, that vision was not allowed to be fully realized. She told Bloody Disgusting:
“I pitched an anthology series that all took place in this town in Hawaii, where everyone for generations previous and for generations future had done something wrong, and someone knew about it. So it was kind of this generational trauma, and these generational lies and generational secrets….This place had its own kind of life from before. So in fact, I Know What You Did Last Summer Season 2 was originally pitched as [Alison’s father] Bruce and [cultist] Clara, and the cult, and what they had done. It was using the night in the cave, where Clara told Dylan everything, as a way of getting back into that world, so that we could have also had some closure about what really happened there.
So that was the original pitch. It was really this kind of anthology about the town,” Goodman added. “I will say that as this the show got written and shot, everyone really didn’t want to completely lose the characters of this first season. So as we were shooting…I was having to pitch future seasons and the finale and make changes, there were less purely anthological versions that were also being talked about…my idea was to use Season 2 to both introduce the cult and tell the rest of the Season 1 story. We could use Dylan to go back into what the cult was, and [reveal] that the cult leader was actually Dylan’s father.”
I Know What You Did Last Summer Was Promoted Too Much Like a Remake to Succeed
While Goodman clearly had a long-ranging vision for her series, it is perhaps the use of the well-known franchise title that doomed it to a swift demise. When the initial announcement about the series was made, the consensus was pretty lackluster at the idea of what seemed to amount to another movie being remade as a TV series. At that point, Prime Video could have ensured that the show was marketed as being more in line with American Horror Story, telling different stories across multiple seasons, but all of them having a connection. It may not have changed the inevitable outcome but would have given the show a fighting chance.
While several horror franchises have successfully been rebooted, like Blumhouse’s Halloween, sometimes the use of a franchise name becomes synonymous with lazy remakes and after a while, audiences just stop tuning in. When it comes to I Know What You Did Last Summer, the TV could have been better adapting the original novel as part of an anthology with a different name, which could have at least allowed it to live and die on its own merits rather than the legacy of an old movie.
