A new study set out to find the most “iconic” movie themes of all time. To do it, they played audio clips from movie scores for 2,000 participants, and then asked them which movie the music corresponded with. Here are the 10 that the most people recognized, along with the percentage of respondents who correctly connected the music with its movie.
1. “Harry Potter”, 36%
2. “Titanic”, 32%
3. “Inception”, 23%
4. “West Side Story”, 23%
5. “Gone with the Wind”, 20%
6. “Raiders of the Lost Ark”, 19%
7. “Jaws”, 18%
8. “Psycho”, 18%
9. “Star Wars”, 18%
10. “Rocky”, 12%
The results are interesting . . . more people connected “Inception” and “West Side Story”, than “Star Wars”? They didn’t release a comprehensive breakdown, but they did reveal a few anecdotes. For example: 17% of people mistakenly thought the “Psycho” theme was from “Pirates of the Caribbean”. 4
5% of people didn’t know what the “Star Wars” theme was from . . . 31% were dumbfounded when they heard music from “Sherlock Holmes”. About 30% thought music from “Inception” was from “Harry Potter” . . . and about 25% thought music from “The Dark Knight” was from “Raiders of the Lost Ark”.
Now, it may seem like they got a lot of NON-movie fans as participants . . . but BEFORE taking the poll, more than half of them BRAGGED that they’d be able to identify movies based on the music alone. It didn’t really pan out that way.
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