While Molly Ringwald acknowledges that her 1985 film The Breakfast Club continues to resonate with audiences, she says it isn’t diverse enough to warrant a remake.
During a panel titled “Don’t You Forget About Me: The Breakfast Club 40th Anniversary Reunion,” at the C2E2 pop culture convention in Chicago on Saturday, April 12, Ringwald said: “I personally don’t believe in remaking that movie, because I think this movie is very much of its time.”
The actress, now 56, continued: “It resonates with people today. I believe in making movies that are inspired by other movies but build on it and represent what’s going on today. This is very, you know, it’s very white, this movie. 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.”
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The stars of The Breakfast Club at C2E2.
James Coletta for C2E2/Reedpop
Ringwald added that she’d “like to see movies that are inspired by The Breakfast Club, but take it in a different direction.”
The Breakfast Club centers on five teenagers from different social worlds — a princess (Ringwald), a basket case (Ally Sheedy), an athlete (Emilio Estevez), a brainiac (Anthony Michael Hall) and a criminal (Judd Nelson) — forced to spend a Saturday together in detention.
The panel event in Chicago saw the five stars reunite in public for the first time since the film’s debut 40 years ago.
“I feel very emotional and moved to have us all together,” Ringwald said during the event.
During another recent cast meetup, at MegaCon Orlando on Feb. 7, Ringwald said the appeal of the movie for her was that she got to enjoy a different high school experience from her own.
“Whenever I got to do a movie, I got to leave my school, and that was amazing,” the actress said. However, the part didn’t totally get her out of school: Ringwald and Hall attended classes on set, she said during the panel. “We’d go do a scene in the library and then study algebra with our studio teacher. But it was fun.”
During the Orlando event, the actors said that despite fan hopes for a sequel, another film was not in the foreseeable future, out of respect for the late John Hughes, who directed the classic and several other films of that time.
“It was something that was conjured and thought about,” Hall shared, referencing one of his last conversations with the film’s director. And while he and his costars were enthused about the idea, they agreed they wouldn’t do it without Hughes at the helm.
Judd Nelson, Emilio Estevez, Ally Sheedy, Molly Ringwald, and Anthony Michael Hall in The Breakfast Club.
Universal/Kobal/Shutterstock
In an interview with U.K. outlet The Times in 2024, Ringwald said that she has noticed some elements of the film that “haven’t aged well” when she’s rewatched it more recently.
“There is a lot that I really love about the movie, but there are elements that haven’t aged well — like Nelson’s character, John Bender, who essentially sexually harasses my character,” Ringwald said at the time.
She added, “I’m glad we’re able to look at that and say things are truly different now.”
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