‘Breakfast Club’ Star Claims John Hughes Wanted Sequel Set Years Later

Sequels have been a part of Hollywood for quite some time. While you can’t take most film titles, slap an “s” on the end, and then turn that “s” into a dollar sign, that’s usually the driving factor. A movie does well, the studio wants more of that success, so they find a way to keep the story going, even if it didn’t necessarily need to. Now, studios are even churning out legacy sequels, where characters return years later and are joined by a new, often younger, cast. Could that have happened with The Breakfast Club?

The Breakfast Club was released in 1985, which means that I had more than two different teachers show it to classes I was in during high school to show how things used to be (it also helps that it turned twenty when I was in high school, and there was lots of fanfare around that). However, things weren’t just different because it was decades later; this was also a high school that was humongous and had more defined societal roles than I was used to. But it’s still a blast.

It also came from the mind of John Hughes, a writer/director who was massively successful in the 80s and 90s. His movies helped define a generation, and while most of them are pretty singular, he was certainly not averse to sequels. After all, he wrote three Home Alones and three National Lampoon’s Vacation flicks. Unfortunately, Hughes passed away far too young in 2009. If he hadn’t, there’s a chance we may have seen a Breakfast Club sequel at some point.

One of the films’ stars, Anthony Michael Hall, recently sat down on The Rich Eisen Show, and when The Breakfast Club came up, he dropped a surprising tidbit: that John Hughes wanted a sequel. “It was something that was on his mind, the idea of bringing back the Breakfast Club,” Hall explained according to Deadline. “Like, those five characters reunited somehow later in their life, and they’re in the workforce, and they’re in their 30s.”

He went on to note that, while he knew Hughes was thinking about it, he doesn’t know if he ever put pen to paper. Still, the way he found out about a potential sequel, now almost forty years ago, sounds like one of the most interesting aspects of the whole story. “He called me with John Candy on the phone, and it was about 1988, and we just hung out on the phone for a couple hours, and he talked about [a sequel] at that time,” the actor explained, and boy oh boy would I like to hear that phone call!

John Candy, John Hughes, and Anthony Michael Hall hanging out on the phone for a couple of hours is one of the more 80s aspects of the story I can think of. It also illustrates how many careers Hughes touched. Would I have wanted a sequel to that film? Maybe! I’d certainly watch all of those actors together again. But not if it was 100 straight minutes of “this is what it was like in the 80s.” We have… more than enough of that.