Recently, Emma Roberts reignited the discussion around nepo babies, which started with a viral article published by New York Magazine in late 2022. The actress said she'd "lost more jobs than I've gained" because her father is Eric Roberts and her aunt is Julia Roberts. "People have opinions and sometimes maybe they're not good opinions of people in your family," she argued before calling the discourse sexist. "Why is no one calling out George Clooney for being a nepo baby? [His aunt] Rosemary Clooney was an icon."

Funnily enough, the same magazine released a "scathing" article about successful young actors in 1985 where David Blum coined the term, "Brat Pack". It was initially a criticism of the "bratty behavior" of an "all-male club" including Tom Cruise, as opposed to the nepo-baby fixation around up-and-coming female artists.

Unfortunately, Brat Pack became a "limiting and judgmental" collective name for then-famous teen stars: "projected" America's Sweetheart Molly Ringwald, Andrew McCarthy, Emilio Estevez, Judd Nelson, Demi Moore, Rob Lowe, and more. Recently, the actors revisited the label's negative impact on their careers in the Hulu documentary, Brats (2024) led by McCarthy.

The Brat Pack Was Originally An All-Male Club Including Tom Cruise, Nicolas Cage, Sean Penn, Rob Lowe, Emilio Estevez, And Judd Nelson

In June 2024, Blum wrote on Vulture: "I Called Them Brats, and I Stand by It Forty years and a doc later, I still don't know why the words 'Hollywood's Brat Pack' caused so much agony." The article was initially pitched as a profile about Estevez starring in the then-new movie, The Breakfast Club. But the cover story took a turn when the journalist had dinner with the actor and his friends, Lowe and Nelson.

He recalled the teen stars "presumably so confident in their capacity to charm that they neglected to notice my murder weapon: a notebook and pen [...] While the St. Elmo's Fire stars amused themselves for hours by repeatedly toasting 'na zdorovye!' with vodka shots, shamelessly flirting with an endless parade of eager women, and boldly cutting lines at nearby after-hours nightclubs, I quietly scribbled what I saw."

After trailing Estevez for days, Blum accumulated a list of the actor's "bratty behavior", like "worming his way into an empty movie theater for free, trash-talking actors like Andrew McCarthy, asking me to follow him in his car and then gunning his engine to 90 miles an hour through the hills of Malibu."

The writer didn't think the term would hurt its self-proclaimed victims. "My headline paid homage to a beloved Hollywood institution known as the 'Rat Pack' — a phrase invented by Lauren Bacall to describe several drunk actors, including Frank Sinatra, David Niven, and her husband, Humphrey Bogart," Blum explained. He didn't even come up with the Brat Pack to call out female teen stars or generalize actors who have starred in John Hughes' films or other ensemble teen flicks back then.

"It seemed to me fair game to include Cruise, [Sean] Penn, and [Tim] Hutton in my story, along with actors Matt Dillon and Nicolas Cage," Blum revealed. "Looking back now, I realize I must have deemed the Brat Pack an all-male club — but history has correctly reconfigured the group to include Demi Moore, Ally Sheedy, and Molly Ringwald. And some actors have simply decided they were in the Brat Pack, even though they never appeared in my story, hung out at the Hard Rock, behaved brattily or even lived in Los Angeles."

Nicolas Cage played an unnamed role in his feature film debut, 1985's Fast Times at Ridgemont High starring Sean Penn.

In Brats, "Brat Pack-adjacent" Lea Thompson — who starred in Some Kind of Wonderful (1987) — told McCarthy, "I wished I was in the club." She then said that despite working with Cruise in All the Right Moves in 1983, the same year Risky Business and The Outsiders premiered, "he did his own thing" and escaped the teen bubble. Three years later, the actor starred in his breakout action film, Top Gun. The Mission Impossible star also forayed into drama in 1988's Cocktails but gained more acclaim in that year's The Rain Man alongside Dustin Hoffman.

Looking back, Blum's attempt at exposing entitled male behavior didn't gain as much scrutiny as the "configured" female-inclusive Brat Pack. Nearly four decades later, Roberts' remarks on Clooney not getting the nepo-baby tag still touches on the same Hollywood problem. While many argue that the Ocean's Eleven star has made a name for himself in the business, so has his female counterparts. For instance, we could say Roberts' mean girl oeuvre — from Wild Child to Scream Queen — is its own formative, multi-generational brat pack.

Emilio Estevez Turned Down A Woodstock Film With Andrew McCarthy After The Brat Pack Article Came Out

In Brats, Estevez — the "original nepo baby" (son of Martin Sheen and brother of Charlie Sheen) — said that Brat Pack made him avoid working with McCarthy. The pair previously worked together in St. Elmo's Fire (1985). They were set to do Young Men With Unlimited Capital: The Story of Woodstock the following year, but Estevez turned it down. "Working together, it almost felt like we were kryptonite to each other," he said.

Talking about Blum's article, Estevez said he was "derailed" by it. "It was naive of me to think that this journalist would, in fact, be my friend," he told McCarthy.

In his recent Vulture article, the journalist shared that he had "learned much later that the Brat Pack's agents and publicists had immediately ordered their clients to avoid one another at all costs — no more Hard Rock burgers, no more na zdorovye! and especially no more ensemble movies." Blum added that a "defeated" Estevez called him after the PR fiasco. He apologized to The Mighty Ducks star but admitted that he wasn't really sorry, thinking the actor would go on with his "still-ascending" career.

"After a couple of weeks of silence, an exhausted, defeated Emilio finally called me at home. I heard his voice in my answering machine, and quickly picked up, naively hoping he was calling to forgive me," he wrote. "It didn't go quite that way. 'What the hell were you thinking?' Emilio asked, plaintively. 'I don't know,' I replied, honestly enough. After a long beat of silence, I added, 'I'm really sorry.'"

In the documentary, McCarthy asked Blum if he thought the Brat Pack article was "scathing". The writer responded: "I mean, I guess in retrospect, yes. At the time, no. I was proud of the creation of the phrase." The friendly confrontation ended with a hug between the two.

In his conversation with Estevez, McCarthy explained that he "perceived [the Brat Pack label] to be very harmful for us because Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg is not going to call somebody who's in the Brat Pack." His St. Elmo's Fire co-star agreed that it "created the perception we were lightweights."

In Brats , Demi Moore told Andrew McCarthy she had "a sober companion with me 24/7" while filming St. Elmo's Fire .

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Molly Ringwald, Anthony Michael Hall, And Judd Nelson Refused To Be Part Of The 'Brats' Documentary

While Lowe, Sheedy, Moore, and Estevez walked down the Brat Pack memory lane with McCarthy, three alums of The Breakfast Club refused to participate in Brats. In a story published by TV Insider on July 2, 2024, Anthony Michael Hall said, "I was asked to be a part of it, but you know what, I'll tell you my attitude is you have to wish everyone success."

"It was just something I chose not to do because I'm always trying to move forward and make new things and do new stuff," Hall said of the Brat Pack documentary.

He added that he's grateful for that time in his career. "The truth is, I've had to embrace the John Hughes period of my life all my career, and I'm happy to do so, obviously, as I've hopefully relayed here," he stated. "It's never been an issue for me. But I also think time has taught me you have to wish everyone success." He also complimented McCarthy on "[carving] out a great career for himself. He's a writer, and he directs TV. He's a cool guy. He's a father, too."

When McCarthy reunited with his Pretty in Pink co-star, Jon Cryer, he disclosed that Ringwald "said she'd think about [doing Brats] but that she'd probably like to keep looking forward." The Riverdale star ultimately opted out of the documentary. Nelson also skipped it but was featured in the ending where McCarthy supposedly gets a call from him before cutting to the former's iconic fist-in-the-air final scene in The Breakfast Club.

Jon Cryer said he wasn't cool enough to be in the Brat Pack but admitted to dating Demi Moore for "a short time while we were working on No Small Affair (1984), but I guess our particular affair was, in fact, pretty small."

In March 2024, the New Jack City actor exclusively told Us Weekly that he "politely declined" the Mannequin star's Brat Pack documentary. "It seems strange to have that subject matter be something for edited entertainment," Nelson told the outlet, adding that McCarthy is "a nice guy, but I hadn't seen him in 35 years. And it's like, I'm not going to [be] like, 'Hey!' No, dude." He then admitted, "I don't even know who's in the Brat Pack."

Nelson continued: "It's like, why kind of rebirth something that wasn't necessarily fun? … How can we be experts on something that didn't ever really exist?" Three months later, McCarthy told The Guardian that he would have loved to change the Brat Pack narrative when it first came out. "If it had come out now, with my own socials, I could have pushed back," he said via Zoom. "I could have pushed back and created my own narrative. We had no way to create a narrative at all."

Andrew McCarthy dismissed comparisons between the New York Magazines' decades-apart Brat Pack and Nepo Baby articles but he claimed, "They'd love to have lightning strike twice."