Molly Ringwald says ‘The Breakfast Club’ is ‘very white’

Forty years on, no one has forgotten about The Breakfast Club. But star Molly Ringwald, for one, has made it clear she doesn’t think it should be remade.

“I personally don’t believe in remaking that movie, because I think this movie is very much of its time,” Ringwald said at a recent cast reunion at the C2E2 convention when the cast was asked if such a movie could be made today.

“It resonates with people today,” she continued. “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. So I would like to see movies that are inspired by The Breakfast Club but take it in a different direction.”

Ringwald has previously remarked that certain parts of the John Hughes film, which costarred Emilio Estevez, Anthony Michael Hall, Judd Nelson, and Ally Sheedy, “haven’t aged well.”

In April 2024, she penned a piece for London’s The Times, in which she called out, for instance, the behavior of Nelson’s character, John Bender, toward her Claire Standish. She wrote that Bender “essentially sexually harasses my character.” She added, “I’m glad we’re able to look at that and say things are truly different now.”

The film depicts five high school students, from various high school social circles that hail from very different families, spending their Saturday together in detention. They get to know each other, especially their heartbreaks, as the hours pass in the school library.

On the panel, Estevez agreed with Ringwald and offered another reason that the teen classic wouldn’t get the same reception in a very different landscape for film.

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“Movies today are concept driven, they’re not character driven, and the beauty of John is that he focused on characters first,” he said. “And when you think about trying to pitch this movie today, it’s about five kids sitting in a library, all day in detention, and then the studio executives would march you right out the door and say, ‘Where are the monsters? Where’s the car chases? Where are the big effects?'”

He noted that The Breakfast Club was made for $1 million. It grossed $45.8 million worldwide, according to Box Office Mojo.

It “was not thought of as a big, giant tentpole film as they make today,” Estevez said. “So there was a lot of risk involved, but by today’s standards, this movie would, I don’t think, would ever get made.”

Watch the cast’s full conversation above.