We Don't Talk Enough About: The "Batman Forever" Soundtrack

A high water mark for a certain type of tie-in schlock

Atlantic Records

There is a lot I don’t personally miss about the pre-Y2K days: Having acne, begging my mom to get off the phone so I could check my Compuserve email account, being scared of girls, being scared of pretty much everyone else.

What I do miss, though — miss more than just about anything else from that era — is the big budget, high profile Motion Picture Soundtrack™. Not scores, those are different things. I’m talking about the unfathomably helter skelter, not-even-a-little-thematically relevant soundtrack that packaged to be as much of a Thing as the actual movie with which it was inexplicably paired — the “here’s one massive smash hit song that plays over a movie’s end credits and becomes inescapable on top-40 radio and/or bar-mitzvah parties, and also a bunch of other, objectively better tracks by lesser-known bands that play in a background scene, probably at a rave, for like seven seconds max. This genre of soundtrack that peaked between the years 1994-1996 with films like The Crow, and Tank Girl, and Romeo+Juliet, but the undisputed heavyweight champion of them all was 1995’s Batman Forever.