Thanks to its feature in The Batman, the latest DC Bat-movie starring Robert Pattinson, a deep cut from Nirvana’s classic 1991 album Nevermind has been surging in streams since the film’s release on Friday, March 4, according to initial reports to MRC Data.
The song in question, “Something in the Way,” appears twice in the film, and also appeared in trailers leading up to its release. The trailer synch actually helped the song debut on Billboard’s charts for the first time in September 2020. It reached No. 2 on Rock Digital Song Sales and No. 45 on the all-genre Digital Song Sales ranking (dated Sept. 5) in the first tracking week after the trailer’s release.
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Since the film’s theatrical release, though, the song has seen an explosion in its streaming numbers, according to initial reports to MRC Data. In the first four days of The Batman’s release (encompassing Friday, March 4 through Monday, March 7), “Something In The Way” earned 3.1 million on-demand official U.S. streams. That number is up from 372,000 on-demand official U.S. streams from the prior four days (Feb. 28 through March 3). That’s a 734% increase over the given period. Its steady growth also helped it crack the top 5 of Spotify’s Daily USA Top 50 songs ranking on Tuesday.
The sharpest overnight growth of the song occurred from Sunday, March 6, to Monday, March 7. It tallied 808,000 streams on Sunday, and then surged to 1.5 million the following day. That’s an 86% increase.
Daily On-Demand Official U.S. Streaming Totals For Nirvana’s “Something In The Way”
Feb. 28: 72,000, according to initial reports to MRC Data
March 1: 78,000
March 2: 99,000
March 3: 123,000
March 4*: 291,000
March 5: 505,000
March 6: 808,000
March 7: 1.5 million
March 8: 1.6 million
(*indicates the theatrical release date of The Batman)
Nevermind spent two weeks at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 in 1992. It marked the group’s first of four No. 1 albums, and spawned three Billboard Hot 100-charting singles: “Smells Like Teen Spirit” (No. 6 peak), “Come As You Are” (No. 32) and “Lithium” (No. 64). The group only returned to the Hot 100 once more afterwards, in 2002, with “You Know You’re Right,” a previously-unreleased track from 1994 that appears on the group’s self-titled greatest hits album.
“When I write, I listen to music, and as I was writing the first act, I put on Nirvana’s ‘Something in the Way,’” Batman director Matt Reeves told Empire in December. “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.”
This isn’t the first time Nirvana’s deep cut has appeared in a popular film. It appeared in the 2005 Sam Mendes film Jarhead and a brief cover appears in Cameron Crowe’s 1996 comedy Jerry Maguire.