The 'Saltburn' effect
A 20-year-old song is rising up music charts thanks to the streaming popularity of "Saltburn."
This post contain spoilers for “Saltburn.”
“Have you seen Saltburn?”
It’s a question I’ve heard many times since the movie, directed by “Promising Young Woman” filmmaker Emerald Fennell, dropped on Amazon Prime Video in December just before Christmas. This is not a movie I would suggest anyone watch during a Christmas holiday with their family, but nevertheless, it seems to be a sensation, likely because of its has-to-be-seen-to-be-believed shock value.
“Saltburn” took its time to catch on with the masses. It originally opened in theaters in November, earning a small $20 million worldwide, including $11 million in the US. It’s a tough sell — an adult dark dramedy about an Oxford University student who spends a summer at a friend’s impressive family estate. But “Saltburn” is much more weird, shocking, and divisive than any log line could suggest, and word of mouth simply never transpired except within critics’ bubbles while it was in theaters.
Now it’s on Prime Video because Amazon recently bought the studio behind the movie, MGM, to form Amazon MGM Studios. While we don’t have hard viewership numbers yet, I’m sure it will perform well when Nielsen releases figures for it in the coming days and weeks. It’s been a regular on Prime Video’s own top 10 list, it’s No. 1 in popularity on Letterboxd as of Sunday, and the “#Saltburn” hashtag has almost 4 billion views on TikTok. Anecdotally, people can’t shut up about it.
It’s a movie, even if unintentional, that is designed for virality — ironic seeing as how it takes place in the late 2000s, at the dawn of social media and smart phones. The movie ends, though, in the present day, finally catching up with the TikTok-obsessed times with a final sequence molded for a social media trend: star Barry Keoghan’s character, Oliver, dances nude throughout his friend’s family mansion that he’s just inherited through sinister means, to the beat of “Murder on the Dance Floor,” a 20-plus-year told pop-dance song by Sophie Ellis-Bextor.
Over the last week, the song has found itself back on music charts. It’s No. 33 on Spotify’s global top songs chart, No. 43 on its US chart, and No. 2 on its UK chart (Ellis-Bextor is from London). It’s cracked the Billboard Hot 100, and is No. 2 on TikTok’s Viral 50 chart.
We’ve seen this happen before. Kate Bush’s 1985 song “Running Up That Hill (A Deal With God)” topped the Billboard Global 200 in 2022 after the song was featured in Netflix’s “Stranger Things” season four. After 37 years, the song was everywhere.
It goes to show the power of a streaming platform with a global audience like Netflix and Prime Video, and it’s the kind of virality that the theatrical industry and movie studios have yet to master. “Barbenheimer” was an accident; audiences got that trend going, and it happened to benefit both “Oppenheimer” and “Barbie.” But the success of “Oppenheimer” hasn’t exactly had a ripple effect. Other adult dramas, like “Napoleon,” “Killers of the Flower Moon,” and even “Saltburn,” have floundered at the box office.
Movie studios have had some success creating online chatter themselves, including Paramount’s “Smile” campaign, which placed creepily smiling actors in public places like baseball games. But for the most part, Hollywood needs to do better to create excitement, or more movies like “Saltburn” — which could have attracted packed theaters full of gasps and grimacing — will fall by the wayside. It’s happened with other movies. Disney has seen films like “Encanto” gain traction on Disney+ after disappointing at the box office, and Sony movies have been enjoying a second life on Netflix after a deal between the two parties.
It’s a problem Hollywood mostly created for itself after it pivoted to streaming during the pandemic. It was supposed to lay the groundwork for the future, but the streaming business is proving difficult for traditional entertainment companies. Now, studio executives and theater owners can do nothing but look on as a movie that first debuted in cinemas helps blow up a two-decade old song, thanks to a tech company that gobbled up a classic film studio.