The 10 best-selling movie soundtracks of all time
Soundtracks and movies form an inseparable bond. You can’t hear the wails of Ennio Morricone without picturing the slit eyes of Clint Eastwood, if you can hear ‘Little Green Bag’ without developing a Reservoir Dogs style swagger then you’ve certainly got more decorum than me, and it would seem that we will never see the day that Celine Dion’s ‘My Heart Will Go On’ doesn’t induce a slew of impromptu stomach-churning scenes between embracing couples. The soundtrack moments form an inseparable marriage with the scenes that housed them.
Naturally, this lifts the status of the songs and the films themselves serve as multimillion-dollar advertising campaigns for the accompanying albums. It’s no surprise that they manage to sell. However, some of them shift such eye-watering units that they enter the territory of being cultural oddities.
The records on the all-time global best-sellers list are inherent oddities. They are artefacts that have surpassed usual levels of popularity and entered a weird phase of becoming a cultural phenomenon. More so than reflecting tastes, they seem to me to reflect a mental anomaly that commercial strategists, psychologists and anthropologists alike should study in-depth. Two film soundtracks have managed to tap into this commercial hysteria.
Both The Bodyguard and Saturday Night Fever somehow feature in the ten best-selling albums of all time list. In fact, The Bodyguard has even sold more than 40 million copies. Much like the film, it’s more explosively cheesy than the initial whiff from a bag of Cheetos and carries all the subtlety of a policeman’s knock.
However, Houston hits notes that threaten to blast satellites out of orbit, and she does it with the sort of control that conspiracy theorists could only fantasise about. Musically it didn’t pull up any trees, but Houston’s vocal volley certainly coaxed the birds from their branches. And perfectly, it also had literal drama to fall back on and temper the cheesiness. In short, the film and soundtrack made sense of each other, and this force seduced the masses.
The same can be said for other movies in the list, like Saturday Night Fever, Dirty Dancing, Grease and Footloose. In each of these outings, you can almost picture people picking up the album, blasting it out, and recreating the scenes… often to horrifying effect, no doubt. They are, in short, very fun records. These might not be albums that rank among the greatest soundtracks of all time, but the sort of folks who turn their nose up at them are the ones at the party who let a false sense of dignity get in the way of a good time and refuse to partake in anything that might prise a laugh.
The 10 highest-grossing soundtracks of all time:
- The Bodyguard
- Saturday Night Fever
- Purple Rain
- Forest Gump
- Dirty Dancing
- Titanic
- The Lion King
- Footloose
- Grease
- Space Jam
