John Hughes Used A Cut Line From The Breakfast Club For Ferris Bueller's Day Off

Filmmaker John Hughes knew the value of being economical. Legend has it that Hughes wrote the bulk of his screenplays in exceedingly short periods of time, sometimes as quickly as a weekend. While it's true that Hughes was something of a savant in terms of concepts and gags, he could get a little lazy, especially toward the end of his career. Most people who've seen "Home Alone 2: Lost in New York" recognize how much it's a carbon copy of the original film, even those who enjoy it. In fact, Hughes' post-"Home Alone" scripts attempted to try to make that movie's lightning strike multiple times, with the likes of "Dennis the Menace" and "Baby's Day Out" feeling like Hughes returning to the well a few too many times. He also tried to get a live-action "Peanuts" movie off the ground.

In fairness to the writer, this technique served him better during the 1980s, when he was making movies primarily about teenage protagonists before he pivoted to precocious children. One element of the filmmaker's work that was and is continually lauded is his ability to write fully realized and relatable characters, something which felt novel when applied to teenagers, who were often stereotyped and thinly drawn up to that point. Hughes was never one to let a good idea or a good line go to waste, and as proof of that, there's a deleted line from 1985's "The Breakfast Club" which ended up finding new life in 1986's "Ferris Bueller's Day Off." As it happens, the line is a great example of how Hughes had a firm grasp on defining characters through dialogue, and thus it works in similar but unique ways in both iterations.

When Premiere magazine was putting together an oral history on "The Breakfast Club" in 1999, the authors were granted the ability to view John Hughes' original cut of the movie. The longer cut ran for about an extra hour than the theatrical version, and among some fully deleted scenes are some extended moments with alternative or deleted dialogue (In 2026, most of this footage can be seen as part of the extras package on the film's 4K and Blu-Ray release from the Criterion Collection). Amongst the deleted dialogue is a line that Allison Reynolds (Ally Sheedy) says when the titular group of students in detention confess more of their truths. While finally describing what her "unsatisfying" life is like for her at home, Allison says:

"My house is like a museum. It's very pretty and very cold."

With the rest of the film as context, it's not hard to see why this line, though illustrative, hit the cutting room floor. Allison's rebelliousness is on display during all of her scenes, and as several of the other characters mention, her chip on her shoulder is more of a defensive mechanism chosen by her than something she has to be. That said, there's a poignancy to the line which perfectly sums up why a girl like Allison would seek to put herself in detention rather than go home to a literally and figuratively sterile environment. While Sheedy's excellent performance as the character made it redundant, Hughes clearly filed the dialogue away in his mind for later.

Later arrived within just a year, as Hughes made a movie which carried some of the same themes as "The Breakfast Club" but flipped the premise on its head. Instead of some misfit teens forced to reckon with themselves and each other while trapped in their school, Ferris Bueller (Matthew Broderick), Sloane Peterson (Mia Sara), and Cameron Frye (Alan Ruck) would break out into the real world, literally and figuratively. It seems that Cameron especially is the most in need of a day off, as Ferris describes his pal's house in one of his many fourth wall breaks to the audience:

"The place is like a museum. It's very beautiful and very cold, and you're not allowed to touch anything."

Ferris continues by adding, "Can you appreciate what it must have been like for Cameron to be in that joint as a baby?," which is Hughes laying it on thick for the audience regarding Cameron's state of mind. Although this use of the line is similar to how it was intended in "The Breakfast Club," its context makes it more multi-layered. Instead of someone using it to describe their own emotional state, it's Cameron as seen through Ferris, indicating Cameron's need to become more self-aware. It also cleverly sets up one of the climactic jokes of the movie, in which Cameron's father's Ferrari, which the group use during their day off, ends up completely totaled by accident. In other words, the line become less of a passive summation, and more an active starting point for an arc.

So, while Hughes could certainly be guilty of repurposing his own material, this is an instance where he didn't just re-use a line, but improved it.