John Hughes, a champion of the teen movie, envisioned a potential return to The Breakfast Club as early as the late 1980s, and Anthony Michael Hall was privy to his pitch.
In an interview with The Independent while promoting Halloween Kills, the actor, who broke out as a teen thanks to a series of notable Hughes projects, detailed his regretful falling-out with the filmmaker, which led to the two not speaking in the 20 years leading up to Hughes’ passing in 2009.
While recounting the last time they spoke on the phone — it was 1987, just as production was beginning on the John Candy and Dan Aykroyd holiday comedy The Great Outdoors — Hall remembered a few details the writer-director had already laid out about a follow-up to his instant classic teen dramedy.
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“At that time, he did mention the potential of doing a sequel to The Breakfast Club,” he recalled. “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.”
While there may have been some vision of a sequel in the works, much of the hope for it fizzled following Hughes’ death at 59 from a heart attack. But prior to his passing, the conversation about a potential Breakfast Club follow-up has resurfaced repeatedly in the years following its 1985 release.
In 2015, actress Molly Ringwald spoke to The Daily Beast for the film’s 30th anniversary about rumored follow-ups with the characters every 10 years. Ringwald said that she didn’t know about that, but had heard of a possible sequel script floating around.
“Somebody told me that there is the script for a sequel to The Breakfast Club. One day, all that stuff will come out,” she said at the time.
A decade earlier, following a near-complete reunion of the film’s cast at the MTV Movie Awards, the now-defunct Moviefone blog reported a potential sequel led by Hughes was in the works. Star Emilio Estevez was allegedly interested in reprising his role as sensitive jock Andrew Clark, telling the blog “If it happens, I’m there.”
“John’s got an idea for a sequel — mature aged students at college, all doing time again — for some reason or another,” Estevez said, according to the outlet. “The twist would be that we’re all the polar opposites of how we were in the original.”
