The Breakfast Club (1985)
- Despite a very rocky opening weekend, The Breakfast Club went on to gross over 5x its initial budget thanks purely to incredible audience word-of-mouth.
- The lead role in The Breakfast Club was originally offered to a massive A-list star who turned it down because they didn't understand the script.
- The studio almost pulled funding for The Breakfast Club midway through the shoot, convinced that the general audience wouldn't connect with the highly unconventional tone.
The Breakfast Club is a 1985 American coming-of-age comedy-drama written and directed by John Hughes. Five high school students โ the brain Brian (Anthony Michael Hall), the athlete Andrew (Emilio Estevez), the basket case Allison (Ally Sheedy), the princess Claire (Molly Ringwald), and the criminal Bender (Judd Nelson) โ spend a Saturday in detention at their suburban Chicago school. As the hours pass and the authority of their pompous assistant principal (Paul Gleason) proves hollow, the five strangers gradually open up about their insecurities, family problems, and the social pressures that have defined them, discovering that their stereotyped identities are masks concealing common fears and desires.
The Breakfast Club was the definitive film of the John Hughes teen canon and one of the most influential films about adolescence ever made. Hughes treated his teenage characters with a seriousness and empathy that was virtually unprecedented in Hollywood โ their problems were not trivialized or played for laughs but presented as genuinely important, and their emotions were given the same weight as adult drama. The film earned $51 million on a $1 million budget.
Simple Minds' "Don't You (Forget About Me)," which plays over the final freeze-frame of Bender's fist-pump walking across the football field, became one of the most iconic ending shots and songs in cinema history.
