A TV series adaptation of I Know What You Did Last Summer is moving forward at Amazon Studios. The series is the second adaptation of Lois Duncan's young adult suspense novel; the first, of course, being the 1997 horror film. Written by Kevin Williamson and released a year after Scream, the film starred a best-of-1990s cast and was credited with revitalizing the slasher movie trend into the new millennium. While critically mixed, an aptly-titled sequel, I Still Know What You Did Last Summer, was released in 1998, followed by a direct-to-video third installment.
The I Know What You Did Last Summer franchise is an unusually popular one: it doesn't boast several sequels, reboots, or any tie-ins across different mediums, although attempts were made. In 2014, Mike Flanagan was announced to reboot the franchise, after having left a huge mark on the horror genre with films like Oculus. Although Sony fast-tracked the project, the last available update is that the studio had hoped the film would be released sometime in 2020. Horror producer Jason Blum had also expressed interest in rebooting the franchise, along with Scream, after already tackling the biggest horror franchise of them all, Halloween. Scream was adapted into a successful TV series at MTV (and has another film sequel on the way), so where does that leave I Know What You Did Last Summer?
Deadline now reports that a YA series adaptation of I Know What You Did Last Summer is moving forward at Amazon. The series will be written by Sara Goodman, who most recently served as executive producer on AMC's Preacher, and will closely resemble the film's premise: a group of teenagers in a seaside town are stalked by an unknown killer a year after being involved in a fatal accident on their graduation night. Although seemingly going in a slasher film direction, the series will be aimed at a young adult audience, which was Duncan's direction in the novel.
Though this news isn't clear on any update of Flanagan's reboot, Amazon states its series is the next best step to make the franchise accessible to a modern audience. “The best horror franchises always have another scare coming," Amazon's COO and CO-Head of Television, Albert Cheng, said, "and this I Know What You Did Last Summer series from Sara Goodman is a perfectly twisted update to the iconic slasher movie.”
Fans and critics will likely see this as a move to perhaps make the studio seem relevant, to give Amazon its own Stranger Things that doesn't include the excessive violence of The Boys or the whimsical, sophisticated mood of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel. That's perhaps the gist, but what Cheng said isn't wrong: I Know What You Did Last Summer's premise is apt for a TV series. It's a moody, atmospheric narrative that requires time to make the audience familiar with the mysterious seaside town at the center of the plot. Should the series make Julie (Jennifer Love Hewitt's character) the protagonist, the audience would need time to relate to her trauma and paranoia that someone is out to get her and her friends for what they did on that fateful night.
Not to mention, this is the obvious next best step for the franchise. A sequel would seem forced all these years later, and the franchise lacks the meta-fiction style of Scream that essentially made Scream 4 a reboot, so a reboot may not exactly work either in this case. But ultimately, horror is having a wonderful time dominating television, and I Know What You Did Last Summer would surely fare well for Amazon once it premieres.
Source: Deadline
from ScreenRant - Feed https://ift.tt/2GYWwxj
No comments: