5 Iconic Movie Songs That Were No One’s First Choice

5 ‘Footloose’

Kenny Loggins had a song all prepared to record for 1984’s Footloose. He called it “No Dancing Allowed,” and its title alone would have clued anyone in on the movie’s premise. But there was a problem, and it resulted from a performance he did the previous January.

He was playing a concert at Brigham Young University — a college that, incidentally, is known for its conservative rules, including rules about dancing. He walked onto the dark stage in front of 8,000 students and then walked right off it, falling four feet. He broke a rib landing that way. In the months that followed, he swallowed a whole lot of Percodan for the pain. 

When the time came to record “No Dancing Allowed,” he was too high to sing it properly. He went to the studio and sang, but it came out all wrong. You’d think he might come back and tried again when the world stopped spinning, but that song was ruined for him. He wrote some replacement song instead.

4 ‘I Will Always Love You’

Everyone had an idea in place for Whitney Houston doing a cover song for The Bodyguard. She’d do a version of the Motown hit “What Becomes of the Brokenhearted” from 26 years earlier. We’re guessing they came up with that by doing a game of word association using her own previous hit “Where Do Broken Hearts Go.” 

Then, right at the end of 1991, Fried Green Tomatoes came out, and it featured some guy doing his own cover of “What Becomes of the Brokenhearted.” So, that plan was out.

Kevin Costner now came up with the idea of Houston covering “I Will Always Love You” instead. That was an odder choice, having her do a Dolly Parton song, but Costner didn’t know it was a Dolly Parton song. He’d fortuitously only heard another cover version, done by Linda Ronstadt, or he’d never have picked it. 

Houston’s “I Will Always Love You” went to sit at number one for more weeks than any previous song in history. The soundtrack to The Bodyguard became the bestselling album of the entire decade and the bestselling album by a female artist of all-time. 

3 ‘Circle of Life’

Elton John wrote every song for The Lion King. That includes “Circle of Life and “Can You Feel the Love Tonight,” which you’ve heard him sing, but also “Hakuna Matata,” “Be Prepared” and all the rest. 

He wasn’t Disney’s first choice. They wanted Abba to do the movie’s entire soundtrack. And Abba were prepared to say yes, but they couldn’t manage it since they were on tour. 

Now, we can’t say for certain that picking one performer who’d been big in the 1980s would have been disastrous while picking another worked out great. We can only speculate on what that alternative movie would have been like. To help us along, here’s the trailer for Mamma Mia! redone using footage from The Lion King, which is the sort of video people used to make for fun around 2010. 

2 ‘Eye of the Tiger’

Not every movie needs to come with an original song. When the time came for Rocky III, they had no plans for one. The movie was going to have a montage, and they already had an existing song picked out to play during it: Queen’s “Another One Bites the Dust.”

But they didn’t manage to secure the rights to that song. So, they commissioned an original one after all, and they wound up with “Eye of the Tiger.”

“Another One Bites the Dust” would have worked fine for the planned montage showing Rocky falling from fame and regressing to his old self. But it never could have been the inspirational anthem they ended up making in its place. 

1 The ‘Titanic’ Theme

There are a lot of things we could tell you about how “My Heart Will Go On” almost didn’t happen. James Cameron didn’t want a pop song on his movie’s soundtrack (he’d mellow in his later years, allowing pop songs for the credits of both Avatar movies), but Sony demanded it. The first choice to sing the song was some woman from Norway. Once they did approach Céline Dion, she didn’t want to it, as she’d already done two big soundtrack hits that decade and didn’t want that to be her only trick. And once she did record it, the music producer for the track didn’t like it.

However, we find none of that as interesting as what happened with the movie’s actual theme — meaning, its instrumental theme, composed by James Horner. 

Horner started by putting together a simple bit of music that he thought could form the basis of something more elaborate. He sent this to James Cameron, labeling it “sketch,” because it was just his sketch of some hypothetical next piece. Cameron read the label and thought the guy was saying that this was music for the scene where Jack sketches Rose. And he concluded that this music would work great for that scene. 

The piano melody is so simple. You could play the righthand part of it with one finger. You could play it with your nose, just pecking at the keys — again, Horner was going to turn it into something much more fancy later. But Cameron realized it was perfect. Other parts of the movie expanded it a little into something more orchestral and grand, but the portrait scene left it entirely stripped down. 

That theme also became the melody for “My Heart Will Go On,” which had to add a few more beats here and there to allow for lyrics that form sentences. Even so, fitting lyrics to the tune was a challenge. The song consists of 178 words, and 163 of them are just one syllable each. The song is 92 percent one-syllable words. 

Go listen again and see. Then try talking or writing in almost exclusively one-syllable words, and realize how completely impossible that is. 

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