John Hughes wrote the script for The Breakfast Club in 1982. Filming took place from March to May 1984. By the time Universal Pictures put it in theaters on February 15, 1985, he had already made Sixteen Candles, and he had already cast two of that film’s young leads in this one. The film grossed $52.1 million against a $1 million budget. Those numbers explain the movie’s reputation. They do not explain the movie.
Trailer, via Universal Pictures At Home.
Five Students Report to Shermer High
The setup is a Saturday detention on March 24, 1984, at Shermer High School in Shermer, Illinois. Five students report: Brian Johnson, the socially awkward nerd; Andrew Clark, the jock; Allison Reynolds, the shy loner; Claire Standish, the popular girl; and John Bender, the rebellious delinquent.
Vice Principal Richard Vernon meets them in the school library. He warns them not to talk or move from their seats. He assigns each a minimum one-thousand-word essay describing who they think they are.
That assignment is the whole movie. Everything that follows is five kids failing to write it and, in the failing, answering it.
Molly Ringwald Wanted Claire, Not Allison
The casting history is messier than the film’s clean reputation suggests. Anthony Michael Hall was cast first, as Brian. His real-life mother and sister play Brian’s mother and sister in the film.
Molly Ringwald was originally approached for Allison Reynolds. She was “really upset” because she wanted Claire Standish, then named Cathy in the first draft. Robin Wright, Jodie Foster, Diane Lane and Laura Dern auditioned for that part. Ringwald convinced Hughes and the studio to give it to her. Joan Cusack was considered for Allison before Ally Sheedy got it.
Emilio Estevez was first cast as John Bender. When Hughes could not find an Andrew Clark, Estevez moved to that role. Nicolas Cage was considered for Bender, the last part cast. Alan Ruck auditioned. The choice came down to John Cusack and Judd Nelson. Hughes picked Cusack, then replaced him with Nelson before shooting because Cusack did not look intimidating enough.
Nelson stayed in character and harassed Ringwald off-camera. Hughes was disappointed enough to consider firing him. The other actors talked him out of it.
A Storage Closet Breaks John Bender
The plot is mostly talk, and it works because the talk has a floor under it. Bender ignores Vernon’s rules and antagonizes everyone. Vernon gives him eight additional weekends of detention.
After lunch the students sneak off to retrieve Bender’s marijuana stash from his locker. When they see Vernon returning, Bender deliberately gets caught so the others can sneak back in. Vernon locks him in a storage closet and berates him, trying to goad him into throwing a punch to prove how tough he is. Bender is visibly afraid and does not move.
He escapes into the ceiling panels and falls into the library. The others hide him from Vernon. They pass the time arguing, listening to music and smoking marijuana, and gradually open up about their home lives.
Claire’s popularity subjects her to intense peer pressure, and her bickering parents use her against each other. She got detention for skipping school to go shopping. Bender describes the physical abuse he and his mother suffer at the hands of his father, including cigar burns and other injuries. He is serving detention for pulling the fire alarm. Andrew became influenced by jock culture.
The Essay Is the Point
Here is what The Breakfast Club gets right, and it is not the rebellion. It is the essay. Vernon hands five teenagers a writing prompt and expects a performance of identity. What he gets instead is a group of kids discovering that the labels they wear — princess, criminal, brain, athlete, basket case — were assigned by other people and accepted out of exhaustion.
The storage closet scene is the hinge. Bender, who has spent the whole morning performing toughness, is asked to prove it and freezes. That is the film’s clearest statement about adolescent masculinity: the performance is the fear. Judd Nelson plays it without a wink.
The marijuana scene gets the credit for the emotional unburdening, but the film is smarter than that. The kids do not become friends because they get high. They become friends because they are trapped in a room with nothing to do but talk, which is a structure Hughes understood better than almost anyone making movies for teenagers in 1985.
Simple Minds Play Over Both Credits
The soundtrack holds ten songs, played partially throughout the film, by rock and new wave acts, plus three instrumentals by producer Keith Forsey. Simple Minds’s “Don’t You (Forget About Me)” plays over the opening and closing credits. Wang Chung’s “Fire in the Twilight” got a music video and reached No. 110 on the US Billboard Hot 100.
Not on the soundtrack: the “Colonel Bogey March” the students whistle when Vernon walks into the room. That omission is a small loss. It is also the funniest music cue in the movie.
Allison’s Makeover Has Not Aged Well
The Breakfast Club runs 98 minutes and carries a tagline that, in this paper’s view, oversells it: “They only met once, but it changed their lives forever.” The film is more honest than its marketing. It ends with the students questioning whether school will ever be the same, not with an answer.
The weak spots are real. In our reading, the makeover of Allison — the loner who is only permitted to be seen once she is conventionally pretty — is the film’s most dated move, and it has not aged into anything better. The jock’s monologue about his father lands harder than the nerd’s, which leaves Brian as the least examined of the five. And Vernon reads to us as a cartoon where the kids are not, which flattens every scene he dominates.
The film is also, technically, not an independent film, since Universal produced it. It has been popularly recognized as one anyway, because of the low budget, because Universal was not the primary production company, and because of how it feels. That argument is worth having. The $1 million budget against $52.1 million in grosses is the part that matters.
The Breakfast Club Earns 6.6 of 10
The Breakfast Club earned acclaim from critics, who consider it one of Hughes’s most memorable and recognized works, and it is considered one of the cornerstone films of the 1980s. The media subsequently referred to its five main actors as members of a group called the “Brat Pack.” Those are facts about its standing, not a defense of its craft.
What holds up is the writing and the ensemble. What does not, to our eye, is the tidy third act, the treatment of Allison, and a vice principal written as a villain instead of a man. The film premiered in Los Angeles on February 7, 1985, and was digitally remastered and re-screened in 430 theaters in 2015 in celebration of its 30th anniversary. It remains the reference point for every movie about a single day in a high school.
That is a legacy. It is not a masterpiece. The Breakfast Club earns its place in the canon on the strength of one long conversation in a library, and in our judgment it spends the rest of its runtime trying to top it.
The Numbers Behind The Breakfast Club
- Title: The Breakfast Club
- Release: February 15, 1985 (US, Universal Pictures); Los Angeles premiere February 7, 1985
- Director and writer: John Hughes
- Runtime: 98 minutes
- Budget: $1 million
- Gross: $52.1 million
- Score: 6.6 of 10
- Cast: Emilio Estevez, Judd Nelson, Molly Ringwald, Anthony Michael Hall, Ally Sheedy, Paul Gleason, John Kapelos
- Setting: Shermer High School, Shermer, Illinois; Saturday, March 24, 1984
- Soundtrack: 10 songs, including Simple Minds’s “Don’t You (Forget About Me)”
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