Molly Ringwald Says ‘The Breakfast Club’ Is “Very White” and Doesn’t Represent the World We Live In

At the 40-year anniversary reunion of The Breakfast Club, Molly Ringwald didn’t just reflect on nostalgia — she got brutally honest about the film’s cultural blind spots. Standing beside her original co-stars at the Chicago C2E2 convention, she admitted what many have thought for years: the film, beloved as it is, was made in a bubble.

“You know, it’s very white,” she said plainly. “You don’t see a lot of different ethnicities. We don’t talk about gender. None of that. And I feel like that really doesn’t represent our world today.”

It wasn’t bitterness. It wasn’t regret. It was awareness — the kind that comes from seeing your work survive generations and realizing how much it missed. Ringwald said she doesn’t support remaking the movie, but she does hope to see new films that take inspiration from it — and actually reflect the world we’re living in now.

“It’s a movie very much of its time,” she said. And while she’s still proud of what it meant to so many, she knows its version of high school didn’t reflect everyone’s reality.

The reunion marked the first public gathering of all five original stars in four decades. And in that moment, while fans celebrated a film that shaped teen cinema forever, Ringwald chose not to sugarcoat its shortcomings — but to shine a light on what’s still missing from stories today.