From ‘Bodyguard’ to ‘Barbie’: Is the movie soundtrack back?
LOS ANGELES — Throughout the billion-dollar Barbie film, an instrumental version of Billie Eilish’s hit “What Was I Made For” weaves in and out, soundtracking the famous doll’s existential crisis. In the final scene — no spoilers! — Eilish’s crackling, saccharine falsetto is finally heard atop the familiar piano. Cue the waterworks.
It is one of many standout musical moments in a movie stacked with them: from Dua Lipa’s disco-pop “Dance the Night,” with lyrics that perfectly sync up to Margot Robbie’s bespoke choreography, to a reimagination of the 1997 Europop hit “Barbie Girl,” courtesy Nicki Minaj and Ice Spice.
The music of Barbie has become its own blockbuster, selling 126,000 copies in its first week and debuting at No. 2 on the Billboard Hot 200 albums chart.
Barbie music has also earned three Grammy Awards, one Golden Globe and two Academy Award nominations in the original song category – more than any other film.
It is hard to pinpoint how long it has been since a soundtrack has dominated conversation the way Barbie has, particularly at the Oscars — Lady Gaga’s A Star is Born performance comes to mind, with the success of “Shallow.” Then there’s La La Land, and Dreamgirls, which received three of the five original song nominations in 2007. But overwhelmingly, there has been a drought in zeitgeist-defining film soundtracks.
So, is Barbie an exception? Or are soundtracks back?
Each decade has produced iconic soundtracks. The all-time best-seller is still 1992’s The Bodyguard powered by Whitney Houston and her iconic “I Will Always Love You,” with 45 million copies sold.
And there are many ways soundtracks are created. Often, studios will license recognizable, preexisting music — likely “the safer play,” as Gary Trust, Billboard’s chart director says — because two-thirds of all music streams are older music.
In the current era, most “successful” soundtracks opt for that — like Guardians of the Galaxy and its 2014 Awesome Mix Vol. 1 soundtrack, which hit No. 1 on the Billboard 200 with songs from the Jackson 5, David Bowie and Marvin Gaye. Musicals have also done well, like La La Land, and Disney hits like Moana, and Frozen — although the genre typically doesn’t crossover to pop radio airplay. (Exception: Encanto and its megahit “We Don’t Talk About Bruno.”)
Another option is to use original
material, like in Barbie — what Trust views as a throwback to movies like Dirty Dancing, released during a time when a single soundtrack could produce multiple radio hits from various artists. In Barbie’s case, that’s Lipa, Eilish, Minaj and Ice Spice.
Spring Aspers, president of Sony Pictures Music Group, says a successful soundtrack is one that works with the
film’s narrative to become a critical part of its story.
“It’s not just finding who’s the most popular but finding incredibly talented artists that know how to create something that really does an extension of the storytelling,” she said.
When it works, you get songs that permeate pop culture with real staying power linked to the film: like Seal’s
“Kiss from a Rose” from Batman Forever, or Celine Dion’s “My Heart Will Go On” from Titanic.
“They just become these forever songs . ... It’s like a great band who has chemistry: the right song, the right visual, the right scene; it just becomes something so much bigger than itself,” explained Aspers. “I know that that’s because of the brilliance of the song and the movie. It’s the two of them together.”
The right soundtrack sync has the power to break an artist, like in the case of Post Malone’s “Sunflower” with Swae Lee on the Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse
soundtrack — the first ever double-diamond single — overseen by Aspers.
Soundtracks can also introduce new audiences to an artist. Take Sophie Ellis-Bextor’s 2001 indie dance hit “Murder on the Dancefloor”; recently, the song went viral because of its use in a very memorable (and very nude) final scene in the divisive film Saltburn.
In January, “Murder” broke the Billboard Hot 100 — a career first for Ellis-Bextor — 23 years after the song’s release. By the end of that month, on TikTok alone, the track has been featured in more than 550,000 videos and the #MurderOnTheDancefloor hashtag has nearly 170 million views. In February, the viral song brought her U.S. television debut on The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon.