When John Hughes died in 2009 at the age of 59 he had mostly been out of show business for more than a decade. He directed his last movie in 1991 and after a few projects he wrote and produced for Disney in the 1990s, his output all but stopped entirely. In his 1980s heyday, though, he was among the most prolific filmmakers in Hollywood, directing, writing or producing multiple movies almost every year from 1983 to 1990.

Hughes left behind numerous unproduced screenplays and who knows how many more ideas he considered but never brought to fruition. One of his most frequent collaborators recently offered some details about one such project that fans would have loved to see made: A decades-later sequel to The Breakfast Club, perhaps the signature 1980s teen comedy.

According to Anthony Michael Hall, who played “The Brain” Brian Johnson in the film and also appeared in Hughes’ National Lampoon’s VacationWeird Science, and Sixteen Candles, the concept of another Breakfast Club was something Hughes was thinking about even as early as the late 1980s. Hall told The Independent that the late filmmaker brought it up in their last phone conversation  in 1987:

At that time, he did mention the potential of doing a sequel to The Breakfast Club. It would have been all of us in our middle-age. His idea was to pick up with them in their twenties or thirties. That [idea] was on his mind, but that was the last conversation I had with him.

The Breakfast Club as a kind of Before Sunset franchise where you reconnect with the characters (the others were played by Judd Nelson, Molly Ringwald, Emilio Estevez, and Ally Sheedy) is one that sounds like it could have a lot of potential — creatively as well as financially. You could see people wanting to know how those teenagers turned down as adults. But if Hughes liked the idea, he never got around to it, although he did work on other sequels of his work, including the National Lampoon’s Vacation series as well as the Home Alone franchise.

Hall currently stars in Halloween Kills, which is playing in theaters now and also streaming on Peacock.

80s Movies That Could Never Be Made Today

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