Soundtrack Staples: Queen's 'Don't Stop Me Now'

The likes of Bohemian Rhapsody from Queen's canon were instant smashes, but other tracks of theirs took more circuitous routes to widespread popularity. Talking globally, the joyous Freddie Mercury-penned Don't Stop Me Now is one such song.

While it was a top ten hit in the UK, the track from the 1978 album Jazz barely scraped the top 100 in Australia and the US, plus it didn't even appear on the original CD release of Queen's Greatest Hits (it's on there now, although the ace David Bowie collaboration Under Pressure has, sadly, disappeared). More recently - or in 2005 to be precise - the song was voted as "the greatest driving song ever" by viewers of revhead nirvana Top Gear.

While it has featured on a handful of movie soundtracks since its release, the appearance of Don't Stop Me Now in "romzomcom" Shaun of the Dead marked one of the most perfect ever collisions of music and movie. This was also credited with the resurgence in popularity of the track, which is now heard regularly on TV and has also appeared in several ads. Shaun is definitely one of the greatest highlights of the 13 movie appearances so far, although many will also love how it turned up in 2020’s Sonic the Hedgehog, as well as, of course, in 2018’s Queen biopic, Bohemian Rhapsody.

Here's the official music video for Don’t Stop Me Now, with those movie appearances listed underneath:

• Space Riders (1984)

• Blackball (2003)

• Shaun of the Dead (2004)

• Notte prima degli esami (2006)

• Amigos... (2011)

• Video Games: The Movie (2014)

• Hardcore Henry (2015)

• Breaking and Entering (2017)

• Animal Crackers (2017)

• Game Night (2018)

• Bohemian Rhapsody (2018)

• Shazam! (2019)

• Sonic the Hedgehog (2020)