40 Years Later, Hollywood Could Never Make ‘The Breakfast Club’
The recent reunion of the cast of *The Breakfast Club* at the C2E2 convention marks their first public appearance together since the film’s release in 1985. Molly Ringwald, Emilio Estevez, Judd Nelson, Ally Sheedy, and Anthony Michael Hall discussed the film’s legacy but shared differing views on its relevance today. Estevez argued that the character-driven narrative of the film would struggle in a market dominated by concept-driven blockbuster films, while Ringwald expressed concern about the lack of diversity and contemporary issues represented in the original. She called for films inspired by *The Breakfast club* that address current social dynamics.
While Ringwald seems to misunderstand the original film’s message of individuality over group identity,which challenged common social labels,Nelson highlighted the importance of independent thinking. The article suggests that any modern remake that emphasizes current social identities would fundamentally alter the core message of the original. Instead of transcending social labels, a contemporary reinterpretation could reinforce them, potentially resulting in a film lacking the impactful messaging of the original.The author concludes that the cast may benefit from reflecting on what *The Breakfast Club* truly represents today.
If you’ve been a teenager in the last 40 years, you’re sure to feel some nostalgia when you think of the characters in The Breakfast Club coming together at the end of the film. So it’s a bit bittersweet to learn that the cast actually never got together afterward.
That changed this month, however, when the five stars of the film reunited in their first public appearance since the film’s 1985 release.
Stars Molly Ringwald, Emilio Estevez, Judd Nelson, Ally Sheedy, and Anthony Michael Hall — now all well into their 50s and 60s — took the stage at Chicago’s C2E2 convention, where they discussed the film’s legacy. Yet personalities clashed almost as much as they did in the film, with Ringwald and Estevez disagreeing on what exactly that legacy is.
For Estevez, who played the handsome jock, Andrew, the film could never be made in the modern era because, “Movies today are concept-driven, they’re not character-driven.”
“When you think about trying to pitch this movie today — it’s about five kids sitting in a library all day in detention — the studio executives would march you right out the door and say, ‘Where are the monsters? Where’s the car chases? Where are the big effects?’”
Fair point. The Marvel universe has plenty of flaws, but it’s keeping Hollywood solvent these days. For all the viewer complaints about endless remakes and spin-offs, original filmmaking doesn’t do all that well at the box office. I guess audiences just want slop — but not the slop Ringwald envisions.
Ringwald, who played the pretty, popular girl, Claire, also seemed to imply that the film would be a flop today, but for a much more ideological reason.
“You know it’s very white,” she explained. “You don’t see a lot of different ethnicities; we don’t talk about gender, none of that, and I feel like that really doesn’t represent our world today. So I would like to see movies that are inspired by The Breakfast Club but take it in a different direction.”
“It resonates with people today, but I believe in making movies that are inspired by other movies, but build on it and represent what’s going on today,” she said.
But does anyone really think a movie about five kids pondering social justice and dissecting their privilege in detention all day would sell tickets in 2025? If Disney’s Snow White flop told us anything, it’s that viewers are finally fed up with in-your-face leftism. Better late than never, I guess.
Yet Ringwald seems to misunderstand one of the very films that catapulted her career. The Breakfast Club’s message cuts against the leftist cult of group identity, a rejection of tribalism set in one of the most tribal micro-societies there is: a suburban, American high school. It sets up five distinct archetypes — the jock, the cheerleader, the rebel, the nerd, and the outcast — only to break them down as the kids spend the day learning to think of themselves, and each other, as individuals.
In Nelson’s words, the film tells us, “Think for yourself.” And that’s the real reason it could never be made today — not because we don’t value free thinking in theory, but because so many people just can’t do it, especially in Hollywood.
It’s not that The Breakfast Club couldn’t be made today because it isn’t flashy or diverse enough. Producers would certainly glam it up, and there would be at best one straight, white guy. But this would produce an utterly stale and conformist film that is the complete inverse of the original.
If you set up Ringwald’s idealized film, the archetypes would have to be totally different: straight, gay, black, white, female, male, etc. But if the point of the film is to highlight the privilege and oppression of these group identities, then the kids can’t exactly transform into individuals who reject being lumped into broad categories. If they did, then they’d have to reject the basis of group grievances entirely. No, we’d wind up with a black girl who learns to embrace her “blackness” and a gay kid who learns to “live his truth.” Rather than escaping group identity, the character development would simply lean further into it.
There’s no way such a film would have the same cultural effect. The original resonated because it told kids they didn’t have to stay in the box their peers and teachers put them in, a message they didn’t often get outside school. But this new version would simply tell kids what they hear all day long from authority figures and school curriculum: You are your group identity, no more, no less.
Of course, a woke Breakfast Club would bomb. More importantly, it wouldn’t even really be The Breakfast Club. It would be something different entirely. But if Hollywood actually took the original message to heart, setting up the new leftist boxes society puts us in, only to break out of them? Now, that’d be a movie worth seeing — but a little countercultural for Hollywood conformists. Either way, a thematically consistent Breakfast Club isn’t getting remade anytime soon.
So I’m glad to see the cast reunited again. But maybe they could use a little more time in detention to think about what the film really means today.
Gage Klipper is a writer based in New York. Previously, he was the culture critic at the Daily Caller and an editor at Pirate Wires.
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