The Breakfast Club has been called the quintessential 1980s film.[48] In 2008, Empire magazine ranked it at number 369 on their The 500 Greatest Movies of All Time list.[49] It later ranked at number 38 on their 2014 list.[50] Similarly, The New York Times placed the film on its Best 1000 Movies Ever list[51] and Entertainment Weekly ranked the film number 1 on its list of the 50 Best High School Movies.[52] In the 2001 parody film Not Another Teen Movie, Gleason reprised his role as Assistant Principal Vernon in a short scene that parodies The Breakfast Club.[53] To emphasize its eminent position within the canon of American coming-of-age films and its continued influence to this day, scholar Björn Sonnenberg-Schrank called The Breakfast Club "the Citizen Kane of the teen film genre".[54]
In 2005, the film received the Silver Bucket of Excellence Award in honor of its 20th anniversary at the MTV Movie Awards. For the event, MTV attempted to reunite the original cast. Sheedy, Ringwald, and Hall appeared together on stage, with Kapelos in the audience; Gleason gave the award to his former castmates. Estevez could not attend because of other commitments, and Nelson appeared earlier in the show but left before the on-stage reunion, prompting Hall to joke that the two were "in Africa with Dave Chappelle". Yellowcard performed Simple Minds' anthem for the film, "Don't You (Forget About Me)", at the awards. At the 82nd Academy Awards (March 7, 2010), Sheedy, Hall, Ringwald, and Nelson all appeared in a tribute to John Hughes—who had died the prior year—along with other actors who had worked with him, including Jon Cryer from Pretty in Pink, Matthew Broderick from Ferris Bueller's Day Off, and Macaulay Culkin from Home Alone. In 2012, the Nickelodeon television series Victorious had their own spoof on the film, in the episode titled "The Breakfast Bunch".
In 2018, The New Yorker published an article written by Ringwald in which she critiqued Hughes's films "in the age of #MeToo", beginning with a discussion of how she explained to her ten-year-old daughter what happened in the scene when her character seems to be sexually-assaulted under a desk.[55] The essay provoked some to claim that Ringwald was criticising the director who made her into a film star, but she was defended by Jenny Han for a "tender, fair-minded piece".[56]
