25 fun facts you didn’t know about your favorite teen movies

The Breakfast Club – Iconic closing scene wasn’t planned 

If Mean Girls was the greatest teen movie of the new millennium, then The Breakfast Club was the greatest teen movie of the earlier generation. In fact, it’s placed at the top spot on Entertainment Weekly‘s 50 Best High School Movies.

The film follows a group of teens who are stuck in detention on a Saturday morning. The four of them could not be more different — a brain, an athlete, a basket case, a princess, and a criminal — but spend the day getting to know more about each other and how they came to be in detention together. The film truly defined an entire generation of teen films in the 1980s, thanks to writer-director John Hughes.

One of the film’s most iconic scenes was at the end, when Bender (Judd Nelson) walks into the sunset with “Don’t You (Forget About Me)” playing in the background, ending with his fist thrust proudly in the air. It has been parodied and referenced countless times by now. But that iconic fist pump wasn’t part of the script.

Nelson was just supposed to walk into the sunset and was told by Hughes to play around with some different ideas. When they were finishing up the scene, he thrust his fist into the air. Nobody knew he was going to do this, but the crew loved it, and now it’s a part of movie history.

John Hughes was actually known to encourage his actors to improvise their lines. Breakfast Club stars Molly Ringwald and Anthony Michael Hall have said in the past that he was always receptive to their ideas and improvisations. These improvisations often made it into the film, such as when Brian says he has a fake ID so he can vote.