Molly Ringwald: Remaking The Breakfast Club Would Betray John Hughes’ Vision
Molly Ringwald says remaking John Hughes’ classics — especially The Breakfast Club — would defy his wishes, but she’s all for fresh reimaginings that capture his spirit.
Remakes are one of those things that can either be fun surprises or absolute facepalms. Depends on your attachment to the original and whether the new version feels like a cash-in. Case in point: Molly Ringwald has thoughts about The Breakfast Club, and she is not shy about them.
Ringwald says a Breakfast Club remake should not happen
Talking to People, Molly Ringwald — who, for anyone new here, was the face of several John Hughes staples like Sixteen Candles, The Breakfast Club, and Pretty in Pink — pushed back on the idea of remaking Hughes movies. There have been whispers for a while about a new Breakfast Club with a crop of younger actors, but Ringwald says the roadblock is simple: John Hughes didn’t want his films remade, and in her view, that should be the end of it.
"They can’t be remade without the permission of John Hughes, and he didn’t want the films to be remade. And I don’t think that they should be really."
As a reminder, Hughes died in 2009 from a heart attack, which makes the idea of getting his blessing, well, impossible. That’s the kind of behind-the-scenes wrinkle that makes this conversation more than just fan chatter.
But she is open to a fresh spin on the idea
Ringwald isn’t slamming the door on anyone exploring the core concept. She’d rather see a modern story that borrows the spirit of The Breakfast Club — kids from different cliques stuck together, learning they have more in common than they thought — and rebuilds it for right now. Her example: something in the lane of 10 Things I Hate About You, which didn’t remake Shakespeare so much as remix The Taming of the Shrew into a teen comedy for its time.
That distinction matters. A 1:1 remake tries to copy the vibe of a very specific era — the 80s, suburban Chicago, Hughes’ voice — and that’s a tough needle to thread in 2026. A reimagining can grapple with problems today’s teens actually have.
Would a modern Breakfast Club even look like detention?
I could see a contemporary take working — not as a straight redo, but as its own thing. Do schools still do classic Saturday detentions? Maybe. But a 2020s version probably involves someone getting benched over social media nonsense, a kid trying to sneak ChatGPT past a suspicious teacher, and a lot of unspoken rules about who posts what and why. The dynamic would be different, which is exactly Ringwald’s point.
So where are you on this? Keep Hughes’ movies off-limits, or build a new story that tips its hat to The Breakfast Club without pretending it’s 1985 again?