Why The Breakfast Club Deserves a Sequel Instead Of a Remake

For anyone who grew up in the 1980s, the fact that the immortal 1985 coming-of-age film The Breakfast Club is nearly 40 years old seems both unfathomable and unsettling, even though the evidence of this has become increasingly and painfully clear since August 6, 2009, when the film’s auteur director and writer, John Hughes, died suddenly of a heart attack at the age of 59.

As the five archetypal teenage characters in The Breakfast Club — shy Allison, stereotypical athlete Andrew, rebellious Bender, dorky Brian, and popular Claire — would now be in their late 50s, Anthony Michael Hall, who plays Brian, and Molly Ringwald, who plays Claire, are now 56, while fellow cast members Ally Sheedy, Emilio Estevez, and Judd Nelson are now in their 60s.

The heightened degree to which these characterizations and performances have become embedded within pop culture is perhaps most evident in terms of how so many people of various ages reflexively view these characters as being like virtual high-school classmates, whose current adult whereabouts are a tantalizing mystery.

While there has been speculation about and expressions of support for a remake of The Breakfast Club, there is a much greater sense of curiosity and drama attached to what happened to these characters, both in terms of how they turned out in adulthood and whether their unlikely friendships survived beyond their Saturday detention.

The Breakfast Club Is an Enduring Pop-Culture Phenomenon

While all of John Hughes’s teen-oriented films are iconic and memorable to varying degrees, The Breakfast Club, which marked Hughes’s sophomore directorial outing after the 1984 teen comedy film Sixteen Candles, is the film that most clearly established Hughes’s towering reputation for being a patron saint of teenage alienation and angst.

One of the most affecting and disarming aspects of The Breakfast Club, which had a production cost of approximately $1 million, is the sheer simplicity of its construction and format. The Breakfast Club tells the story of five high-school students from disparate social cliques who have been forced to spend one Saturday in detention in their school library for various transgressions.

Almost the entire film takes place in and around the school library, where the teenagers slowly begin to relate to one another. They talk about their high-school personas and overarching happiness. They talk about the various reasons for their detention. They mostly just talk. While the contained, conversational structure of The Breakfast Club led some critics to describe The Breakfast Club as being the My Dinner with Andre of teenage films, referring to the acclaimed 1981 comedy film about two friends who engage in a feature-length conversation at a Manhattan restaurant, the cultural impact of The Breakfast Club has far transcended this comparison over time.

By giving its teenage characters increased emotional depth and making them much less stereotypical than has been seen in most other teenage-oriented films, by influencing several ensuing decades of teenage cinema and overall teenage behavior, The Breakfast Club has gained a reputation for being the Citizen Kane of the teen film genre.

The Shermer High School Class of 1985 40 Year Reunion

One of the most telling moments in The Breakfast Club is when Brian asks the four other teenage characters in detention about what will happen when they return to school on Monday morning. Will the friendships that they’ve developed with one another in Saturday detention continue, or will the characters revert to their traditional high school cliques and avoid one another?

Perhaps the most interesting scene in The Breakfast Club, in the context of a potential sequel, involves a confrontation between the film’s most worrisome character, Bender, and Richard Vernon, the perpetually frustrated Shermer High School vice principal who oversees the Saturday detention. During a confrontation between Bender and Vernon, Vernon tells the four other teenagers that if they each want to have a good laugh, they should find Bender in 10 years. This represents a brutal take-down of Bender, whose triumphant raised-fist gesture while walking across the school’s football field in the film’s final scene can be viewed as being either the beginning of a positive turning point for Bender or the peak of the rest of his life.

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The Brat Pack Label

Of course, a major aspect of the enduring legacy of The Breakfast Club is evident in how the film served to install its young stars as charter members of The Brat Pack, the derogatory term given to the select group of young performers who appeared alongside one another in several coming-of-age 1980s films, led by The Breakfast Club.

In the 2024 documentary film Brats, Emilio Estevez and Ally Sheedy lament their seemingly inescapable attachment with the Brat Pack label and teen film genre, while Anthony Michael Hall, Judd Nelson, and Molly Ringwald declined to be interviewed for the film, ostensibly because they’re focused on looking to the future instead of dwelling on the past.

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The varying degrees of frustration that the stars of The Breakfast Club hold for the Brat Pack label provide fertile inspiration for a sequel, in terms of how the adult versions of the teenage characters perceive their teenage personas and the labels that they were forced to endure in high school. As The Breakfast Club makes clear, labels and words can have great meaning and power.