Is The Breakfast Club 2 Happening, Or Is School Out Forever?
In 1985, a princess, a brain, a jock, a basket case, and a criminal got together for weekend detention and came out of it changed people. The culture of Gen X was often defined by the stereotypes they fit in as teenagers, whether it was the truth of who they were or not. Nowhere was that more apparent than in the films of writer/director John Hughes. "The Breakfast Club" is a pivotal movie for that generation.
In the film, we spend the day with a group of kids in weekend detention. Claire (Molly Ringwald) was the popular rich girl whose parents didn't care about her. Brian (Anthony Michael Hall) was the brain who attempted suicide after getting a failing grade that didn't meet his parents' expectations (Hughes played his dad in an uncredited cameo). Andrew (Emilio Estevez) was the jock who got in trouble for physically abusing one of Brian's friends. Allison (Ally Sheedy) was the "basket case" who tried to be weird because she was ignored by everyone. Bender (Judd Nelson) was the delinquent living with an abusive father.
For decades, fans have wondered if the newly forged understanding and friendships between the group members at the end would last beyond the weekend detention. In fact, the characters wonder about it in the film. Is there any way we could see a sequel, either with new cast members or with the older ones at the age the actors are now?
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Why hasn't The Breakfast Club 2 happened yet?
Almost four decades after the release of the film, we have yet to see a sequel. Though John Hughes wrote sequels to "Home Alone" and the "National Lampoon" films, he didn't do any for his teen angst stories. After years of wondering, everyone assumed there wasn't going to be one. And while we'll get to something Hughes reportedly said about the possibility of "The Breakfast Club 2," if anything had gone farther than the talking stages, nothing had materialized by 2009, when Hughes died of a heart attack at the age of 59.
Hughes did tend to work with the same actors over and over again, like Molly Ringwald, who also starred in "Sixteen Candles" and "Pretty in Pink," and Anthony Michael Hall, who appeared in "Weird Science," "Sixteen Candles" and "National Lampoon's Vacation." Still, Hughes was telling new stories, writing, directing, and producing throughout his prolific career. The actors in this film were steadily working, so it might have been a good deal for Universal Pictures (who distributed the movie) to sign on for a sequel. However, Hughes' untimely death would likely have stopped any plans that had been in place.
Everything the cast and crew have said about The Breakfast Club 2
In 2021, Anthony Michael Hall spoke to The Independent about his film "Halloween Kills," where he said that back in 1987, he and John Hughes spoke on the phone about a possible follow-up to the film. Hall said:
"It would have been all of us in our middle age. His idea was to pick up with them in their 20s or 30s. That [idea] was on his mind, but that was the last conversation I had with him."
I have thoughts about the idea of someone in their 20s or 30s being in middle age, but that does make more sense than trying to do something too close to the actual film. Hall wasn't the only one to talk about Hughes having an idea. In fact, Molly Ringwald told The Daily Beast in 2015 (via The Hollywood Reporter):
"Somebody told me that there is the script for a sequel to 'The Breakfast Club.' One day, all that stuff will come out."
Hall and Ringwald weren't the only cast members to speak about a sequel. All the way back in 2005 (prior to Hughes' death), Emilio Estevez told Moviefone some details about Hughes' ideas for a second film. He revealed that he'd do it if it happened, saying:
"John's got an idea for a sequel — mature aged students at college, all doing time again — for some reason or another. The twist would be that we're all the polar opposites of how we were in the original."
What could have happened in The Breakfast Club 2
Obviously, this all came to naught. The actors are all in their 50s and 60s now, so discovering where they were a decade or two after they were stuck in that school one weekend is out the door. Between that and the passing of John Hughes, that story couldn't happen with the original actors. The studio could, of course, do a modern retelling of "The Breakfast Club," but it couldn't recapture that time period.
The film is problematic, as Molly Ringwald herself said in a 2018 article she wrote for The New Yorker, right at the height of the #MeToo movement. So were a lot of Hughes' films, though we didn't really think about that at the time. Well, some of us did, but people in junior high and high school watched these characters experience what was actually happening in their own schools. It was planted firmly in the experience of teens at the time, something that, as Ringwald recalled, wasn't common outside of cheesy afterschool specials created by people who seemed to never have spoken to a teen.
That said, the idea that these characters ended up as the opposites of who they were in school could work at the age the actors are now. It would be interesting to see what happened all these years later and how they judged their own behavior. Still, it seems like it's better left in the past as a touchstone for a generation and a product of its time and its writer/director.