I’m a big fan of movie music. My personal collection currently consists of 116 full instrumental soundtracks, ranging from scores composed by Zimmer to Williams to Newton Howard, and it is always growing.

That being said, I recently did a study for a college class to see if there were factors that made some movie theme songs more recognizable than others. I compiled a playlist from my personal collection, consisting of 41 movie themes that I personally considered most recognizable (admittedly revealing some bias), found in the following YouTube video:

I only managed to survey 45 people, but I did find a few trends that I thought were quite interesting. The most recognized film themes were as follows:
1. Harry Potter, John Williams
2. Star Wars, John Williams
3. Jaws, John Williams
4. Pirates of the Caribbean, Klaus Badelt (Curse of the Black Pearl) & Hans Zimmer (sequels)
5. James Bond, original theme by Monty Norman
6. Titanic, James Horner

And the least recognized:
1. The Amazing Spider-Man, James Horner
2. War Horse, John Williams
3. The King’s Speech, Alexandre Desplat
4. Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Alan Silvestri
5. The Social Network, Trent Reznor & Atticus Ross
6. Night at the Museum, Alan Silvestri
7. The Bourne Identity, John Powell
8. A Bug’s Life, Randy Newman

It occurred to me that the release year of the movie might be a factor, especially among the general age group of these participants, the majority of whom were born between the years of 1985 and 1994. Using the same list of most and least recognizable film themes, I took note of the release year of each movie, or, for series like Star Wars, the release year of the first movie in the series, and averaged them together. The average release year of the most recognized films is 1986, while the average release year of the least recognized films is 2004 – a difference of about twenty years.

To confirm that this is indeed a correlation, I took the average of all of the films located between the most and least recognized and averaged their release years together, which ended up being 1996, showing that my suspicions appear to be correct. Though the majority of the test group had not yet been born in 1986, these results could suggest that the more time that the film and its music have spent in “cultural circulation,” the more likely it is to be recognized by the general population, which is why the newer themes, some from as recent as 2012, were not as widely recognized by the participants.

I also took the average domestic box office gross for each film into consideration; in theory, a higher the box office gross means more people saw the film, which could also mean that the film’s music is more recognizable due to a higher level of cultural permeation. For a series of films, I averaged the domestic box office gross of every film in the series to come up with the average per film in the series, then averaged together all of the most recognizable themes and the least recognizable, as well as for all of the films in between for confirmation, and the results once again seem to support the theory.

The average domestic box office gross per film for the most recognized films is about $361 million, while the average for the least recognized films is about $204.5 million, with the average for the films in-between these two comes to be $241 million. So, again, we see a correlation, this time between box office gross and music recognizability; five of the most recognizable films, or, at least, films from the series, are located on the list of the top twenty highest-grossing films of all time, while none of the least recognizable films are located anywhere higher than forty-eight on that same list. This is a correlation that makes sense in that it monitors the number of people who are theoretically familiar with the film.

Due to the fact that only 45 college-aged students were surveyed, these results are by no means representative of the population as a whole, but I still found the results to be intriguing, and I hope that you do as well!

I have a personal website, ChadLikesMovies.com, where I share my opinions of films and their soundtracks, and my newest project, ChadTalksMovies.com, is a supplemental blog where I plan to offer additional commentary on movies, their music, and anything else I find relevant. The full write-up of this survey is the first post on that site, which can be found here.
Thank you for reading!