The Breakfast Club

Did You Know?

• The film's soundtrack album peaked at No. 17 on the US Billboard 200.
• The song 'Don't You (Forget About Me)' by Simple Minds reached No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100.
• The film was first released on VHS and LaserDisc, with later DVD and Blu-ray editions including a 25th Anniversary Edition in 2010.

Plot

On a Saturday in March 1984, five teenagers from Shermer High School in Illinois show up for a full-day detention. The group includes Brian Johnson, a socially awkward academic; Andrew Clark, a jock; Allison Reynolds, a quiet and isolated girl; Claire Standish, a popular student; and John Bender, a rebellious troublemaker. They meet in the school library with Vice Principal Richard Vernon, who orders them to stay silent and seated, then assigns each a one-thousand-word essay on their identity.

Bender immediately breaks the rules, provoking the others and challenging Vernon. In response, Vernon adds eight more weekends of detention to his sentence. After lunch, the group sneaks out to grab Bender’s marijuana from his locker. Spotting Vernon returning, Bender intentionally gets caught so the others can slip back in. Vernon locks Bender in a storage closet and taunts him, daring him to throw a punch. Bender, clearly scared, doesn’t move. Once Vernon leaves, Bender escapes through the ceiling panels and drops into the library, where the others hide him from the vice principal.

The five spend the rest of the day arguing, listening to music, and smoking marijuana. Slowly, they reveal their personal struggles and the reasons behind their detention. Claire, under constant peer pressure and caught between her fighting parents, got detention for skipping school to shop. Bender describes the physical abuse he and his mother endure from his father, including cigar burns; he was there for pulling the fire alarm.

Andrew, pressured by his father to excel in wrestling and influenced by jock culture, taped another student’s buttocks together to gain approval, landing him in detention. Brian, crushed by his parents’ academic expectations, considered suicide after failing shop class and brought a flare gun to school for that purpose; it exploded in his locker, leading to his detention. Allison, whose parents neglect her, is a compulsive liar who steals and hoards small items, planning to use them if she ever runs away. She says she came to detention simply because she had nothing better to do.

Production

The movie was almost called The Lunch Bunch, but John Hughes changed it after learning a friend at another school had a detention group called "The Breakfast Club." Hughes wrote the script around the same time he was working on Sixteen Candles. That script took him only a few days to write and impressed studio executives enough to make it his directorial debut. Molly Ringwald and Anthony Michael Hall had both appeared in Sixteen Candles, released in 1984.

Near the end of filming that movie, Hughes asked them to join The Breakfast Club. Hall was the first actor cast, taking the role of Brian Johnson. His actual mother and sister played his character's mother and sister in the film. Ringwald was initially offered the part of Allison Reynolds, which upset her because she wanted to play Claire Standish, then called Cathy in the first draft.

The role had drawn interest from Robin Wright, Jodie Foster, Diane Lane, and Laura Dern. Ringwald eventually persuaded Hughes and the studio to give her the part. Joan Cusack was considered for Allison before Ally Sheedy was chosen.

Emilio Estevez was first cast as John Bender, but when Hughes could not find an actor for Andrew Clark, he moved Estevez to that role. Nicolas Cage was considered for Bender, which was the last role filled. Alan Ruck also auditioned, but the choice came down to John Cusack and Judd Nelson. Hughes initially picked Cusack but replaced him with Nelson before filming began, feeling Cusack did not look intimidating enough.

At one point, Hughes grew frustrated with Nelson for staying in character and harassing Ringwald off-camera; the other actors had to talk Hughes out of firing him. Todd Bridges was offered an audition for an unspecified role after Hughes approached him on a plane, but he later declined when a studio executive said they did not know how to write for black people. Rick Moranis was originally cast as the janitor, but producer Ned Tanen let him go, believing his over-the-top Russian caricature did not fit the film's serious tone. John Kapelos replaced him.

Reception

Roger Ebert gave the film three out of four stars, praising the acting as "wonderful" and noting that while the plot was "more or less predictable," it didn't require major surprises. He felt the movie was simply about teenagers learning to open up to one another, and he complimented its sharp ear for how they actually talk. Gene Siskel, writing for the Chicago Tribune, awarded it three and a half stars. He observed that the same confessional structure had worked in films like Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, The Big Chill, and My Dinner with Andre, and it worked here too.

Siskel particularly appreciated that the film never gave in to the expected teenage movie tropes of sex or violence, staying instead in its claustrophobic setting. Kathleen Carroll of the New York Daily News praised director John Hughes for his ability to capture teenage emotions and for his strong connection with the cast, whom she said deserved top marks.

Not every critic was impressed. Janet Maslin of the New York Times acknowledged the presence of good young actors but argued that Ally Sheedy and Judd Nelson were given roles that were impossible to play. She felt the five leads would have worked well together naturally, without the forced, fake intimacy of an encounter group, and that Hughes should have trusted his characters rather than pushing them into that contrived honesty. James Harwood of Variety was harsher, dismissing the film as something that might seem profound to teenagers simply because the characters talk to each other instead of engaging in typical teen antics like dancing or throwing food. He added that this didn't mean they had anything intelligent to say.

Looking back in 1998, James Berardinelli offered a more balanced view. He admitted that few would call The Breakfast Club a great film, but he found its honesty refreshing compared to the many generic teen movies of its era. He acknowledged the dialogue-heavy script, though he noted it wasn't the kind of talky film you'd confuse with a work by Éric Rohmer. Still, he concluded that it was hard not to get drawn into the world of these characters.

Legacy

The Breakfast Club has been called the quintessential 1980s film. In 2008, Empire magazine ranked it at number 369 on their The 500 Greatest Movies of All Time list. It later ranked at number 38 on their 2014 list. Similarly, The New York Times placed the film on its Best 1000 Movies Ever list and Entertainment Weekly ranked the film number 1 on its list of the 50 Best High School Movies.

In the 2001 parody film Not Another Teen Movie, Gleason reprised his role as Assistant Principal Vernon in a short scene that parodies The Breakfast Club. To emphasize its eminent position within the canon of American coming-of-age films and its continued influence to this day, scholar Björn Sonnenberg-Schrank called The Breakfast Club 'the Citizen Kane of the teen film genre'. Sebastian Stan described the superhero film Thunderbolts (2025) as 'The Breakfast Club of Marvel'. In 2005, the film received the Silver Bucket of Excellence Award in honor of its 20th anniversary at the MTV Movie Awards. For the event, MTV attempted to reunite the original cast. Sheedy, Ringwald, and Hall appeared together on stage, with Kapelos in the audience; Gleason gave the award to his former castmates. Estevez could not attend because of other commitments, and Nelson appeared earlier in the show but left before the on-stage reunion, prompting Hall to joke that the two were 'in Africa with Dave Chappelle'. Yellowcard performed Simple Minds' anthem for the film, 'Don't You (Forget About Me)', at the awards. At the 82nd Academy Awards (March 7, 2010), Sheedy, Hall, Ringwald, and Nelson all appeared in a tribute to John Hughes—who had died the prior year—along with other actors who had worked with him, including Jon Cryer from Pretty in Pink, Matthew Broderick from Ferris Bueller's Day Off, and Macaulay Culkin from Home Alone. In 2012, the Nickelodeon television series Victorious had their own spoof on the film, in the episode titled 'The Breakfast Bunch'. In 2018, The New Yorker published an article written by Ringwald in which she critiqued Hughes's films 'in the age of #MeToo', beginning with a discussion of how she explained to her ten-year-old daughter what happened in the scene when her character seems to be sexually assaulted under a desk.