What is the biggest-selling film score?
When it comes to the biggest-selling albums of all time, the film soundtrack holds a healthy presence among the very lofty top ten.
At number ten is Bee Gees and various artists’ immortal disco record to 1977’s Saturday Night Fever, but standing tall with the bronze medal is 1992’s The Bodyguard: Original Soundtrack Album, boasting a whopping 45million reported sales with the help of Whitney Houston’s bellowing cover of Dolly Parton’s ‘I Will Always Love You’.
Any soundtrack seemingly needed Kevin Costner’s lucrative touch, who also starred in 1991’s Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves and propelled Bryan Adams’ drippy ‘(Everything I Do) I Do It for You’ to a UK number one for 16 long, interminable weeks.
The 1990s were a boom time for soundtracks, Pulp Fiction, The Lion King, and Forrest Gump shifting serious units, but what about original film scores? While Hollywood has gifted the music world with enduring pieces from the likes of John Williams or Ennio Morricone that are destined to live on for centuries, while enjoying high sales, such LPs never broke records despite still selling millions. In the top ten selling film soundtracks of all time, Bollywood grabs three entries, all with 20million claimed sales each, the Jatin-Lalit duo breaking records with 1995’s Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge and Nadeem-Shravan enjoying two entries with 1990’s Aashiqui and 1991’s Saajan.
The biggest-selling film score of original music, however, is attached to a box office monster that for years stood as a global movie record breaker.
So what is the biggest-selling original film score?
Premiered in November 1997 and seeing general release the following month, James Cameron’s Titanic dominated the day’s pop culture, gobbling up 11 Oscars—and triggering a cringeworthy acceptance speech from Cameron—the first movie to hit a billion ticket sales, and cementing Leonardo DiCaprio’s adult career.
Titanic also let loose Céline Dion’s wailing power ballad ‘My Heart Will Go On’. Saturated in stodgy Celtic flutes and melodramatic fuss, the French-Canadian singer scored the biggest-selling single of 1998 and became a radio fixture, never seemingly more than five minutes away from her bludgeoning yelp. Co-star Kate Winslet even let slip to MTV News in 2012 that the behemoth single made her feel “like throwing up”.
Such a phenomenon also pushed the Titanic: Music from the Motion Picture CD to the top of the Billboard 200 two months after its release, still standing as the biggest-selling film orchestral score of all time, save for the inclusion of Dion’s single, selling 27million claimed copies and the 26th biggest-selling album in general.
Composer James Horner had struck gold. Having soured his relationship with Cameron due to differences on Aliens, Horner’s work on Braveheart turned Cameron around, hiring him, eager to emulate the new age sonic made famous by Enya, originally sought by the director for the soundtrack. The pair would reunite for 2009’s sci-fi fantasy Avatar, Cameron’s next feature film as director and surpass the box office record he’d set with Titanic, standing as the first film to gross $2billion worldwide.
