The film follows newly 16-year-old Samantha Baker (Ringwald), who deals with a seemingly unrequited crush on high school senior Jake Ryan (Schoeffling) while also being pursued by freshman Farmer Ted (Hall).
Retrospectively considered to be one of Hughes's best films, Sixteen Candles helped launch the careers of Ringwald, Schoeffling, and Hall.
In suburban Chicago, high school sophomore Samantha "Sam" Baker is hopeful her 16th birthday is the beginning of a great new year, but is shocked when her family forgets the occasion because her older, beautiful, self-absorbed sister Ginny is getting married the next day.
At home, Sam's day gets worse when she discovers she must sleep on the sofa because her grandparents and a foreign exchange student named Long Duk Dong are all staying at the house for the wedding.
In an effort to salvage his reputation with all the geeks, Ted bets Bryce and Wease a dozen floppy disks that he will get physical with Sam before the dance ends.
John Hughes originally wrote Sixteen Candles in 1982 as a low-budget production which A&M Films agreed to finance for $1 million.
Mom (1983), he decided to resume pre-production on Sixteen Candles as his directorial debut as he felt it had more commercial appeal to his teenage target audience than his other planned film The Breakfast Club (1985).
Mom, Ned Tanen greenlit both films at Universal Pictures under a three-year $30 million contract on the condition that Hughes release Sixteen Candles first.
[4][5] John Hughes had asked his agent for headshots of young actresses, and among those he received were those of Robin Wright, Molly Ringwald and Ally Sheedy.
[11] For the part of Ted, Hughes saw a number of actors for the role including Jim Carrey, Jon Cryer, Keith Coogan and Ralph Macchio.
[4] Sixteen Candles was filmed primarily in and around the Chicago North Shore suburban communities of Evanston, Skokie, and Highland Park, Illinois during the summer of 1983, when leads Ringwald and Hall were 15 years old.
[21] The Motion Picture Association of America initially rated the film R, but Hughes won an appeal for it to be released as PG.
The website's critical consensus reads: "Significantly more mature than the teen raunch comedies that defined the era, Sixteen Candles is shot with compassion and clear respect for its characters and their hang-ups".
[28] Ringwald's performance was especially praised; Variety called her "engaging and credible"[29] while Roger Ebert wrote that she "provides a perfect center for the story" in "a sweet and funny movie".
[30] Janet Maslin of The New York Times called the film "a cuter and better-natured teen comedy than most, with the kinds of occasional lapses in taste that probably can't hurt it in the circles for which it is intended.
But most of the movie is cheerful and light, showcasing Mr. Hughes's knack for remembering all those aspects of middle-class American adolescent behavior that anyone else might want to forget.
"[31] Gene Siskel of the Chicago Tribune gave the film three-and-a-half stars out of four and called it "the best teenage comedy since last year's Risky Business", saying it was "certain to draw a lot of laughs, but the guess here is that it also will offer comfort to young girls and boys who feel awkward.
And comfort and moments of recognition are in short supply in teenage movies, which often portray a world of violence and sexual mastery that is a lie.
"[34] Gary Arnold of The Washington Post wrote, "Hughes isn't vigilant or deft enough to prevent the dramatic focus of attention from shifting at about the halfway point; he can't quite finesse the letdown that sets in when the engaging teen-age heroine, Samantha, delightfully embodied by Molly Ringwald, is allowed to become almost a subsidiary character in the second half of the story.
Nevertheless, Sixteen Candles blends an idiosyncratic screwball imagination with a flair for updated domestic comedy and scenes of intimate, quirkily affectionate character interplay.
[36][37] A 1984 review in The New York Times criticized the character of Long Duk Dong for being "unfunny" and a "potentially offensive stereotype" of Asian people.
[4] In an article published in Salon, Amy Benfer considers whether the film directly condones date rape even though no sexual activity is established, consensual or otherwise.
"[40] Author Anthony C. Bleach has argued that one possibility for Caroline's emotional and physical ruin in the film "might be that she is unappreciative of (or unreflective about) her class position", adding that, "What happens to Caroline in the narrative, whether her sloppy drunkenness, her scalping, or the potential for sexual coercion, seems to be both a projection of Samantha's desire to acquire Jake and become his girlfriend and a project of the film's desire to somehow harm the upper class.
[48][49] In March 2022, it was announced that Peacock was developing a comedy series titled 15 Candles, described as a reimagining of the film while focusing on four Latina leads.