Anthony Michael Hall speaking at a panel at Phoenix Comicon in 2017

The Breakfast Club Sequel That Started as a Phone Call in 1988, When John Candy Was Still Alive

August 22, 2026 Bobby And Jason

By Bobby Catalano & Jason Pascoe·We were on Dance Party USABobby was already in the Dance Party USA studio when this came out. Jason was a year away. The feel is memory. The facts are research, checked against the record.

Anthony Michael Hall says John Hughes wanted to make a Breakfast Club sequel. Hall told the story on The Rich Eisen Show on August 5, 2026, the day before the seventeenth anniversary of Hughes’ death, and the detail that makes it land is the phone call.

“You know what’s crazy? The last time I spoke to Mr. Hughes, he called me with John Candy on the phone, and it was about 1988, and we just hung out on the phone for a couple hours, and he talked about it at that time,” Hall said.

Hughes wanted the sequel to follow the five Breakfast Club characters as working adults in their thirties. Hall, who played Brian Johnson, was about twenty years old when that phone call happened. He is fifty-eight now.

What was John Hughes’ plan for a Breakfast Club sequel?

According to Hall, Hughes discussed bringing the original five characters back as thirty-year-olds in the workforce. That is all Hall said about the idea itself. He did not describe a plot or a script. “I mean, it’s a long time ago,” Hall said. “So I think that it was something he was playing with. I don’t know if he had written it or not.”

The original film, released February 15, 1985, followed five students through a single Saturday detention at Shermer High School in suburban Illinois: Brian Johnson the brain, played by Hall; Andrew Clark the athlete, played by Emilio Estevez; Allison Reynolds the basket case, played by Ally Sheedy; Claire Standish the princess, played by Molly Ringwald; and John Bender the criminal, played by Judd Nelson. Hughes wrote and directed it.

A sequel set in their thirties would have placed the characters in the late 1990s, more than a decade after that Saturday detention. They would have been old enough to have made real choices and young enough to still be living with them. That is a different kind of pressure than Saturday detention, and Hughes was at least turning it over.

Why was there never a Breakfast Club sequel?

Because Hughes died. He had a heart attack on August 6, 2009, in New York City. He was fifty-nine years old.

Hall said the 1988 phone call was the last time they spoke. That means whatever Hughes was playing with died with him, or died well before him, in the twenty-one years between that phone call and his death. We do not know whether he ever put any of it on paper.

There is another thing about that phone call. John Candy was on the line too. Candy died on March 4, 1994, at forty-three. Both men who were on the other end of the phone are gone now.

Where is the Breakfast Club cast now?

All five principals are alive. Hall is fifty-eight. Ringwald is fifty-eight. Estevez is sixty-four. Sheedy is sixty-four. Nelson is sixty-six.

On April 12, 2025, all five of them stood on the same stage for the first time in forty years. It happened at C2E2, the Chicago Comic and Entertainment Expo, at McCormick Place, in the same metro area where they filmed the original movie, at Maine North High School in Des Plaines. The panel was called “Don’t You Forget About Me: The Breakfast Club 40th Anniversary Reunion.”

Estevez had been the holdout. He had skipped every prior reunion. “I skipped all of my high school reunions,” he said at C2E2. “This was something that, finally, I felt I needed to do for myself. It’s here in Chicago and it’s the 40th anniversary, and it just felt like it was time.”

What we keep thinking about

The sequel Hughes described would have shown us those five people at thirty. The actors are pushing sixty. The gap between the movie he imagined and the age they are now is the whole story, and it is the part nobody else is saying.

In 1988, Hughes called Hall with Candy on the line, and the three of them talked for a couple of hours about bringing the Breakfast Club kids back as adults. That conversation happened three years after the film came out. The actors were barely out of their teens. The sequel would have been a look at what growing up actually did to them.

Instead, Hughes stopped making the kinds of films that made him Hughes. He moved to producing. He wrote Home Alone and its sequels. He never directed another film after Curly Sue in 1991. The world we grew up in kept getting further away, and then he was gone.

The five of them finally stood together in Chicago in April 2025. Hughes was not in the room. Neither was John Candy. The sequel they talked about on the phone in 1988 would have been about five people in their thirties trying to figure out what happened to them. Now the five of them are in their sixties, and the man who put them there has been dead for seventeen years, and that is what happened to them.

Bobby and Jason

Frequently asked questions

Did John Hughes plan a Breakfast Club sequel?
Anthony Michael Hall said on The Rich Eisen Show on August 5, 2026 that Hughes discussed the idea of a sequel during a phone call around 1988. Hughes wanted to bring the five characters back as thirty-year-olds in the workforce. Hall said he does not know whether Hughes ever wrote it.

When did John Hughes die?
John Hughes died of a heart attack on August 6, 2009, in New York City. He was 59 years old.

Did the Breakfast Club cast ever reunite?
Yes. All five principals reunited for the first time in forty years at C2E2 in Chicago on April 12, 2025, for the film’s 40th anniversary.

Who was in the Breakfast Club?
Anthony Michael Hall played Brian Johnson, Emilio Estevez played Andrew Clark, Ally Sheedy played Allison Reynolds, Molly Ringwald played Claire Standish, and Judd Nelson played John Bender. John Hughes wrote and directed the film, released February 15, 1985.

Sources

Photo: Gage Skidmore (CC BY-SA 2.0), via Wikimedia Commons.