Great Songs That have Aged Better than the Movies They’re From

Nothing helps make a good movie better like a great soundtrack. Directors like Wes Anderson and Quentin Tarantino are especially renowned for their excellent choice of songs for their movies, but just about every movie ever made has a music supervisor on hand to pick the right music for the mood.

Often, the best course of action is to commission a song to be written specifically for the movie. This is so commonplace that there’s an Oscar category for it.

Sometimes though, an artist will write an absolutely incredible song for a movie that ends up being decidedly not. Sometimes the movie is fine, but it fails to implant itself in the annals of history. Other times, the movie is just plain bad.

In either case, the songs are remembered much more fondly than their respective films. Here are some of the most notable.

Seal – Kiss From a Rose (From Batman Forever)

Alright, technically speaking, “Kiss From a Rose” wasn’t written for Batman Forever. In fact, it wasn’t even the first soundtrack it was on (that would be Neverending Story III: Here Come the Fantasians, a terrible movie in its own right).

Seal wrote the song in the mid-eighties and never showed it to anyone until his second album in 1994, at which point he was embarrassed (!) to show it to his producer. It only had modest success until it was rereleased a year later as the second single for the Batman Forever soundtrack. The blockbuster brought it much more attention and it hit the top spot on the Billboard chart, and also gave us this delightfully bizarre music video of Seal singing in front of the Bat Signal.

Goo Goo Dolls – Iris (From City of Angels)

Quick: when was the last time you thought about City of Angels? The supernatural romantic drama isn’t exactly among Nicolas Cage’s most memorable roles (was it even mentioned in The Immense Weight of Incredible Talent?) even if it did find him starring against 90s It Girl Meg Ryan.

However, “Iris,” the main theme of the movie, remains a cornerstone of pop music history. But this isn’t just a sort of passing association: Nic Cage’s character—an angel who gives up eternity to live as a human because he’s in love with Meg Ryan—was the central inspiration for the lyrics. It should be obvious. I mean, “I’d give up forever to touch you”? That’s the whole plot.

Despite its schlocky origin, “Iris” became the band’s best-known hit and would be released on Dizzy Up the Girl, which I still contend is their best record.

The Entire Soundtrack to Twilight: New Moon

A decade later, the Twilight films must feel like a flash in the pan. They were just an odd series of bad movies that had some cult following. It’s almost absurd to think about just how strong their cultural blitzkrieg was. Much of its cast became massive stars because of the popularity of the movies—even if Robert Pattinson would rather forget them entirely.

The one thing those movies did well though was the music. All of the movies have great soundtracks, but the best of them was New Moon, the second in the saga, which was entirely comprised of songs written for the movie. This included original tracks from Thom Yorke, Grizzly Bear, Death Cab For Cutie, Lykke Li, Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, and a wonderful collaboration between St Vincent and Bon Iver.

None of that made the movie any better. Except for the scene of Bella running through the woods that was basically just a music video for “Hearing Damage” by Thom Yorke.

The Smashing Pumpkins – The End is the Beginning Is the End (Batman & Robin)

Say what you will about Joel Schumacher’s run with the Caped Crusader, there’s no denying that those two movies had some excellent soundtracks (Batman Forever even had Sunny Day Real Estate on it). There’s maybe no larger disconnect between a movie and its soundtrack than that of the campy neon of Batman & Robin and the dark brooding Pumpkins track in the closing credits.

And good thing, too, because this song rules. Written in the chaos following Mellon Collie & the Infinite Sadness and drummer Jimmy Chamberlain’s departure, “The End is the Beginning is the End” (as well as their second track on the soundtrack, entitled “The Beginning is the End is the Beginning”) found the alt-rock superheroes combining their noisy guitar rock with additional electronic elements—a trend that would be fully realized on their album Adore.

Destiny’s Child – Independent Woman pt 1 (from Charlie’s Angels)

This song came on at my physical therapist’s office a few weeks ago, and my mind instantly remembered how ubiquitous it was in the early 2000s. It was number one on the Billboard Chart for eleven weeks. It might have even been the track where we all realized that Beyonce was bound for Überstardom.

Then, the bridge hit, where Beyonce sings, “Charlie, how do your angels get down like that?” and suddenly I remembered that this song was originally written for the remake of Charlie’s Angels. You know, the one that starred Cameron Diaz, Lucy Liu, and Drew Barrymore. When was the last time any of us thought about that movie?

Bryan Adams – (Everything I Do) I do It For You (From Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves)

I’ll admit that this was one of my favorite movies as a kid, even though it, uh, might not actually be that good. In my defense, I was five. Why didn’t Robin Hood have a British accent? Where’s Prince John? What’s with that witch lady? Yuck.

But its main theme—Bryan Adams’ “(Everything I Do) I Do It For You”—has aged much, much better than the film attached to it. Just the other day, my wife and I sang it to our baby, and I was surprised at how much of it we remembered without any music.

Even as a five year old, I was fully aware of the power of this power ballad. I have a distinct memory of experiencing some very big feelings to the guitar solo in the front seat of my mom’s Toyota Supra (why wasn’t I in a car seat? Man, we just used to let people do anything, huh?). To this day, that solo remains one of my reference points for what a perfect guitar solo is.

Simon & Garfunkel – Mrs. Robinson (The Graduate)

Alright, The Graduate is a great movie. I’m not saying it’s bad. However, I’m not sure anyone could argue that the lead single from its soundtrack has definitely left a bigger crater on pop culture. Even today, “Mrs. Robinson” is a staple of Yesterday & Today type radio stations, where The Graduate is becoming a more and more obscure film with every passing year. The last big reference to it was probably Bee Movie, which is itself closing in on its twentieth anniversary.

Daft Punk – Tron Legacy OST

Now, I didn’t hate this movie as much as critics seemed to. The cyberpunk sequel has just over a 50% on Rotten Tomatoes, which I personally think is unfair.

However, I’m not going to act like Tron Legacy wasn’t primarily a two-hour-long music video for Daft Punk’s excellent, excellent soundtrack. And that’s just fine, because this soundtrack bangs.

Twenty-One Pilots – Heathens (Suicide Squad)

Hey, remember Suicide Squad? No, not the James Gunn movie that came out last year, the one before that that the 2021 film completely ignored. Yeah, yeah, the one with Jared Leto as the worst Joker ever put to film.

That movie sucked. It blew chunks. It was bad.

But it did give Twenty One Pilots their biggest hit to date, charting at number two. In fact, I didn’t even know this was originally from a soundtrack at all until Ryan pointed it out.

M83 – Oblivion OST

I have a huge weak spot for big budget sci-fi movies that have more style than they do substance. So even as much as I enjoyed Oblivion, I’m not going to pretend it’s that good of a movie.

Its soundtrack, on the other hand, was a work of art. French post rock/electropop/shoegaze artist M83 lent his particular brand of retrofuturism to the sparse Tom Cruise-inhabited landscape, but it also counts as a great M83 record in its own right.

Radiohead – Exit Music (For a Film) (Romeo + Juliet)

One more caveat: Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet is a great movie and I’m standing by it. However, it’s not controversial to claim that Radiohead’s “Exit Music (For a Film)” has much more notoriety than the titular film it was written for, thanks to its inclusion in their timeless record OK Computer, which is still considered by many to be their best.

Oddly enough, “Exit Music” wasn’t actually released on either soundtrack released by Capitol Records (The Bends era B-side “Talk Show Host,” used as a recurring theme in the film, is). As the story goes, Baz Luhrmann sent the band a videotape containing the last twenty minutes of the film and asked them to write a song for the end credits. By the time the band sent the song, the soundtrack had already been sent to the record label for approval. It wasn’t available outside of the movie at all until OK Computer was released a year later.

What are your picks for best songs from the worst movies? Let us know in the comments.

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