Which movie theme song held the number one spot for the longest?
When Michael Jordan flew through the air in his first Space Jam training session, I was transfixed, not because of the skills, not because of the live-action/animation crossover, but because of the scene’s soundtrack.
Who would have thought ‘Fly Like An Eagle’ by Seal would have been the perfect choice for mesmerising basketball skills?
When I considered just why the moment stuck in my head so much, I thought, maybe it was my age, my general love for sport or just perhaps, my love for Looney Tunes. But what in fact was the music, a song that up until that point had no real business in my day-to-day life, suddenly being paled into significance through context.
Of course, Seal’s smooth number was my first introduction to the healthy relationship between cinema and music, one that soon blossomed with my own tastes when I got older. Digging through the Blockbuster DVD section, I worked my way through Quentin Tarantino’s filmography, where I learnt the true power of music in movies.
“That’s one of the things about using music in movies that’s so cool, is the fact that if you do it right, if you use the right song, in the right scene; really when you take songs and put them in a sequence in a movie right, it’s about as cinematic a thing as you can do,” Quentin Tarantino once explained.
Adding, “And when you do it right, and you hit it right, then the effect is you can never really hear this song again without thinking about that image from the movie.”
But there is a distinct difference between preexisting songs giving edge to a scene and writing an outright soundtrack. It is a completely different beast altogether, hemming the given artist into a tight creative structure where their lyrics have to loosely follow a storyline.
They can either use it as a loose motif or outrightly embrace the storyline, creating a song whose narrative mirrors the exact film. Some of the finest examples of the former are Billie Eilish’s soundtrack for No Time To Die or the entire Graduate album from Simon and Garfunkel. But often, the more commercially successful have followed the latter approach. Piggybacking off the success of whatever blockbuster they are soundtracking, these sonic replicas go on to smash the charts.
So, what soundtrack stayed at number one for the longest?
The 2017 film The Greatest Showman takes the prize, having held the top spot for 19 non-consecutive weeks. While you may be somewhat surprised given the wealth of options in this field, it’s not that shocking given the overwhelming box office success of the movie. Upon release, it grossed $435million worldwide against an $84m budget.
When The Greatest Showman eventually claimed the top spot, it beat off a titan of cinema that had held the record since its release in 1977. Saturday Night Fever, rather unsurprisingly, held the title, having spent 18 non-consecutive weeks at the top spot, largely thanks to The Bee-Gees and their iconic disco contributions.
