The Breakfast Club cast reunite after 40 years.

The stars of the ’80s teen classic came together for a one-off panel at Chicago Comic & Entertainment Expo.

For the first time since production on The Breakfast Club wrapped over 40 years ago, the five stars of the John Hughes teen dramedy reunited, sparking nostalgia and a sudden apprehension of their own mortality in generations of fans.

Yesterday, Emilio Estevez, Anthony Michael Hall, Judd Nelson, Molly Ringwald and Ally Sheedy mounted the stage at  Chicago Comic & Entertainment Expo to rapturous applause. Moderated by Josh Horowitz, the one hour panel covered the production and legacy of both The Breakfast Club and it’s late writer and director, John Hughes.

The location of the reunion added extra poignancy. Hughes, who passed away in 2009 at the age of 59, was born in nearby Lansing, Michigan, and set many of his films in the fictional Chicago suburb of Shermer. As Hughes once explained, “When I started making movies, I thought I would just invent a town where everything happened. Everybody, in all of my movies, is from Shermer, Illinois. Del Griffith from Planes, Trains and Automobiles lives two doors down from John Bender. Ferris Bueller knew Samantha Baker from Sixteen Candles. For 15 years I’ve written my Shermer stories in prose, collecting its history.”

Released in 1985, The Breakfast Club is a bona fide, no-foolin’, generation-defining classic. A kind of teen-centric chamber piece, it follows a Saturday in the life of five disparate teens stuck in detention, who discover surprising commonalities over the course of the day. Featuring a blistering New Wave soundtrack centered on Simple Minds’ iconic “Don’t You (Forget About Me)”, it’s widely (and rightly) considered one of the greatest teen films of all time.

The reunion comes at a time of heightened interest in the Brat Pack generation of young stars who came to fame in the ’80s. In 2024 Andrew McCarthy, who starred in the Hughes-penned Pretty in Pink, directed a documentary, Brats, about the experience of being thrust into the spotlight at such a young age. While Estevez and Sheedy are interviewed, along with contemporaries Jon Cryer, Demi Moore, Rob Lowe, and more, Ringwald, Nelson, and Hall declined to participate.

But they’re all on deck here for a pretty entertaining, occasionally bittersweet, hour of reminiscing. A few notable highlights:

• Apparently Emilio Estevez was the holdout preventing the reunion from happening earlier, for which he is rightly roasted by his castmates.
• Maine North High School in Des Plaines, Illinois, the school where The Breakfast Club was filmed, is now a State Police building. “we should go there tonight,” Nelson quips at one point.
• Anthony Michael Hall, who played the nerdy Brian, is now an absolute behemoth. Apparently his growth hit during production, and he refers to the movies he made with Hughes as “the Puberty on Film Trilogy”.
• Judd Nelson now sort of sounds like Dennis Hopper. But he did land one of the most touching compliments to the late Hughes, saying “He was the first writer who could write someone young without them being less.”
• Molly Ringwald has watched The Breakfast Club with her own kids, noting that “…they didn’t pick up their phones once.”

You can watch the whole thing here on Popverse, in a frustratingly unimbedable video. If you’re of a certain age, it’s gonna hit you right in the feels.