The most overplayed pop song in cinema history, according to science
Credit: Far Out / De’Andre Bush
For some reason, you don’t really immediately associate songs with movies anymore, not new ones anyway. It used to be that pop songs topping the charts quite often were taken from big-screen smashes, whereas now you’d struggle to name one from the past five years.
The last example I can really think of would be Lady Gaga’s ‘Shallow’ from the Bradley Cooper-directed A Star is Born, but then that’s a musical movie anyway, so it’s bound to have some half-decent songs in it, and besides that was 2018, so that’s eight years back now.
There has definitely been a drop off in any tunes that become famous thanks to a movie, no doubt due to a shift in the sheer amount of music available to listen to, soundtracks usually now featuring loads of dramatic, Inception-style BWAAAAA sounds instead of Celine Dion ballads and the fact it’s cheaper to license old songs rather than approach artists to write new ones.
But there’s still certainly a market in soundtracks – Nick Cave, for one, has made a decent sideline career out of providing music for movies, as has Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood, and some blockbusters like Barbie still pack a full album of contributions from stars including Dua Lipa.
But in the heyday of the 1990s, big-budget films, there were countless tentpole tunes that dominated worldwide charts for weeks, sometimes months on end, and that’s backed up by some tasty stats from the boffins at statsignificant.com, who revealed the most popular Billboard number one hits featured in films, ever, which ironically sounds like a compilation album in itself.
Regardless, anyone like me who was around in 1992 and was haunted on a daily basis by it will not be surprised to know that the most popular, and therefore most overplayed, pop song from a film is Whitney Houston’s ‘I Will Always Love You’, the Dolly Parton cover from Kevin Costner’s The Bodyguard that you would hear from almost every car, every house, every radio station and sometimes in your sleep that year, which stayed atop the US charts for a torturous 14 weeks.
Not far off that, and again from a film released in 1992, which was obviously a year where studios decided to do artist/movie tie-ins, was Boyz II Men’s ‘End of the Road’, which troubled the number one spot for more than three months, far longer in fact than the Eddie Murphy movie Boomerang from which it was taken, because that flopped entirely.
Number three on the list was a relatively more recent song, although still one from 23 years ago now, which is quite a terrifying realisation – it was Eminem’s ‘Lose Yourself’ from his rap biopic 8 Mile, and it sat atop the Billboard charts for 12 weeks in 2002.
The closest to that the site could get in the last ten years or so was Charlie Puth’s weepy classic with Wiz Khalifa called ‘See You Again’ in 2015, released on the back of Fast and Furious 7, which of course used CGI to craft a farewell scene to the late Paul Walker using the song as a backdrop.
While the music and movie landscape has undoubtedly changed over the decades, now and then, studios and artists will still give it a go. The recent Smurfs movie released last year was preceded by a song specially for the film by Rihanna, who voiced the lead character, but it didn’t really help it from sinking without a trace into a blue, stodgy mess.
