It’s the 1990s. You’ve just finished watching a big-budget action movie starring Kevin Costner, Nicolas Cage, or Bruce Willis. The final wry one-liner has been delivered, it’s time for the credits to roll. As the text begins to scroll across the screen, something unexpected begins to blare on the soundtrack. After a movie where the majority of auditory elements have comprised of either yelling or explosions, suddenly, a teary romantic ballad begins to play. It’s slower-paced, sung by a famous artist, and it’s not here for ironic effect. On the contrary, everyone involved in this production is 110% committed to this tune.

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Where Did All the End Credits Ballads Go?

This is the blockbuster end credits romantic ballad, a staple of big-budget movies of the 1990s. It’s vanished in the modern world, but that doesn’t mean it can never come back. There’s never been a better time to reach into the past and deliver a whole new crop of inexplicable romantic ballads.

But to understand why this fixture of vintage blockbusters should return, one must understand why they existed in the first place. Pure and simple, this was a marketing exercise. Promoting blockbusters has changed a lot in the last few decades and a key way they were put into the public eye back in the 1990s was by attaching a big-name artist to the production through an end credits ballad. The likes of Bryan Adams and Aerosmith could help draw more eyeballs to the blockbusters they were attached to if they sang a huge single that topped the Billboard charts.

These romantic ballads also reflected the focus of blockbusters from this era. Many of these titles focused heavily on romantic attractions between two characters, a contrast to modern blockbusters like The Avengers or the most recent Star Wars installments, which tend to focus on platonic dynamics between its principal characters. For the likes of Armageddon and Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, though, love was the name of the game and the passionate feelings of the protagonists needed a properly sweeping musical accompaniment. Such desires could only be fulfilled by iconic artists who could also deliver plenty of extra marketing exposure for these titles.

The Music-Selling Business Started to Decline

Image via The Guardian

For a while, these tunes were a surefire way of selling lots of albums and even scoring Oscar nods (in the Best Original Song category) for explosion-laden tentpoles that otherwise wouldn’t get invited to the ceremony. However, at the dawn of the 21st-century, blockbusters began to eschew these hallmarks of the genre. For one thing, the business of selling and promoting music, as well as the decline of the music video, occurred once the year 2000 began, hindering the promotional ability of these romantic ballads.

For another, the 2000s were dominated by big-budget projects leaning on grimness and realism, not passionate romance. It’s hard to imagine Celine Dion being able to come into the end credits of War of the Worlds or The Dark Knight belting out a romantic ballad. The 2010s toned down the grimness, but projects like Guardians of the Galaxy and Deadpool made reaching into the 1970s and 1980s for familiar needle drops the new norm for blockbuster soundtracks rather than original romantic tunes. On top of everything else, the few movies that tried, like 2012 setting its end credits to an original Adam Lambert track, didn’t make much of a pop culture impact to suggest these types of songs could make a comeback. Because of these and other reasons, the romantic ballad end credit tune has been missing from blockbusters for so long…but it’s time to bring them back.

The chief reason to revive this staple boils down to one word: nostalgia. The 2010s were defined by pop culture influenced by the 1980s. Now it’s time for the 2020s to shift over to the next decade, and that includes bringing back something that was all over blockbusters in the 1990s. If channeling 1980s fixtures like Stand by Me and classic Amblin movies proved to be a reliable formula for box office glory in the 2010s, who’s to say taking some cues from the credits from Armageddon couldn’t be a similarly lucrative prospect for cinema in the 2020s? The affinity Hollywood has for nostalgia makes it inevitable that this style of tune will make its way back into blockbuster entertainment.

Blockbusters Are Romantic Again!

Image via IMDB (20th Century Fox Film Corporation)

It also helps that blockbusters are beginning to shift back into caring about romances again, as seen by 2021 titles like Free Guy and Eternals. The future of expensive American movies seems to have several titles fixated on romance, including movies like Thor: Love and Thunder. With so much love in the air, shouldn’t this new crop of blockbusters take a cue from the past and give these passionate fits of romance appropriately sweeping bits of end credits songs? With the culture circling back to a fondness for smooches and big romantic speeches, it only seems fitting that the end credits romantic ballad would also find its way back into the world of blockbusters.

It doesn’t hurt that staples of the music marketing scene from the 1990s have come back in full force in the modern pop culture scene. After more than a decade of dormancy, YouTube helped bring back the music video in an unprecedented way. Modern pop stars ranging from Lil Nas X to Taylor Swift to Ed Sheeran now put an elaborate amount of effort into music videos that function more as standalone short films rather than just ways of showing off a new single. This provides a benefit for musicians looking to use visual elements to enhance the underlying meaning of their tracks.

Will We See a Resurgence in Romantic Ballads for Movies Soon?

However, it also makes the prospect of new blockbuster end credits romantic ballads an extremely enticing one for studio executives. Not only can one produce a hit music video for these ditties featuring popular artists like it’s 1992 all over again, but there are new ways they can interact with the film. The more expansive nature of modern music videos means they could promote and even directly connect with major blockbusters in a way that nobody involved with Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves could’ve imagined decades prior. It isn’t just nostalgia making this comeback seem like a foregone conclusion, it’s also exciting new elements of the present.

Nobody would ever try and declare that songs like “I Don’t Wanna Miss a Thing” are musical masterpieces or even the very best original tunes feature-length movies had to offer in the 1990s. But they were unique creations that entertainingly ran counter to the films they were attached to. After so many years of grim blockbusters playing things “realistically”, it’s high time a more buoyant age of blockbusters is ushered in with the return of these end credits romantic ballads. Let a new generation of moviegoers experience the tonal whiplash of going from Nicolas Cage dropping ribald quips to LeAnn Rimes passionately belting out a love song.