The Batman is a great film that you should definitely see, but even if you haven't, we've got some pretty good signs that the movie will ultimately be successful. Not only have critics given The Batman rave reviews, and it's topped the box office charts for the second week, but one of the movie's key songs has risen to the top of the music charts.
Nirvana's "Something In The Way" was never one of the bands' hit singles, but it appears twice in The Batman and also features heavily in the movie's trailer. Soon after The Batman's theatrical release (as reported by Billboard), "Something In The Way" stream requests shot up 734% to a total of 3.1 million streams over four days from March 4 to March 8. March 7 had 1.5 million streams alone.
All that streaming put "Something In The Way" in Spotify's top 5 list of Daily USA songs yesterday, which was pretty cool.
For those who missed the grunge era, Something In The Way is from Nirvana's breakout album Nevermind, which hit number one on Billboard's top 200 back in 1992. It had three hit singles in "Smells Like Teen Spirit," "Come As You Are," and "Lithium," with "Something In The Way" being a down-tempo song that made it a great fit for MTV's Unplugged special.
The Batman director Matt Reeves revealed to Empire last December that music is a special part of his process and Nirvana is a personal favorite.
“When I write, I listen to music, and as I was writing the first act, I put on Nirvana’s ‘Something in the Way,’” Reeves said. “That’s when it came to me that, rather than make Bruce Wayne the playboy version we’ve seen before, there’s another version who had gone through a great tragedy and become a recluse. So I started making this connection to Gus Van Sant’s Last Days, and the idea of this fictionalized version of Kurt Cobain being in this kind of decaying manor.”
As great as The Batman is, I personally think Kojima had the right choice of Batman film in The Lego Batman movie.