The 1985 film The Breakfast Club, starring Emilio Estevez, Anthony Michael Hall, Judd Nelson, Molly Ringwald, and Ally Sheedy, is one of the most popular and definitive works of writer-director John Hughes, his second time behind the camera, following 1984’s Sixteen Candles. That was only the beginning of a prolific career that included hits like Ferris Bueller’s Day Off and Planes, Trains & Automobiles. He also served as the screenwriter for films like Home Alone and Maid in Manhattan. Sadly, Hughes died of a heart attack at age fifty-nine in 2009, cutting short what surely would have been a lengthy and even more impressive run.
Among the projects that Hughes never got to make was a sequel to The Breakfast Club. In a recent interview for Halloween Kills with The Independent, Hall discussed the “sequel that never was.” Hall shared memories of his final phone conversation with Hughes in 1987. “At that time, he did mention the potential of doing a sequel to The Breakfast Club. It would have been all of us in our middle-age. His idea was to pick up with them in their twenties or thirties. That [idea] was on his mind, but that was the last conversation I had with him.”
Hall was nostalgic about the chance to work with and get to know Hughes. “John had a very sensitive soul, and I think that’s what also gave him an ability to tap into the internal experience that we all have as kids, as we become teenagers and then grow into adulthood…I wish I could have spent more time with him. To let him know how much I loved him and how much he meant to me. Because, you know, he gave me my start, and so much more.”
Other reports have surfaced in the past about what the sequel that could have been. Collider and MovieWeb report that Estevez said at a cast reunion at the MTV Movie Awards in 2005 that each of the students who met in detention in the first film would come “back together around college, but that they would be ‘polar opposites’ of their original characters.” A decade later, Ringwald said that “Somebody told me that there is the script for a sequel to The Breakfast Club. One day, all that stuff will come out.”