15 Movie Trailers That Used Music From Other Movies

What do you do when you want to advertise a movie, but you don’t want to use stock trailer music, or a dramatically slowed-down version of a pop song like all the other guys? You use a piece of a soundtrack composed for another movie, of course. Music from other movies is used and reused more times than we might imagine—a lot of “temp” scoring for films and television shows is just substituting tracks from other soundtracks you like to give the scene the right feel before any original score is layered over it. (This is why, in some cases, a lot of movies can end up “sounding” similar.)

But advertising movies using other movies is a little more complicated. How do you indicate to an audience that whatever upcoming movie you’re hyping is a lot like other movies these people have already seen, and like? You simply make your movie sound like all those other movies. Fantasy films might use music from other well known fantasy films. Sci-fi movies may use music from other sci-fi films, and dramas from other dramas. Sometimes, the genre doesn’t even matter: a track from a horror movie might be used for the trailer for a drama.

Movie trailers using recognizable, even famous music from other already existing movies is a common practice that has gone on for decades, so we decided to gather a few of the best, oddest, and most thematically appropriate examples of this phenomenon to show the range that a score can have — the soundtrack doesn’t just stop as soon as one movie ends.