“We Don’t Talk About Bruno” reaches Billboard’s Hot 100 top spot

After 29 years, a song from a Disney film has reached number one on the Billboard Hot 100.

Disney is known for creating some of the most beloved classics and endearing animated films of all time. From Snow White, Fantasia, and The Lion King to Moana, Frozen, and Zootopia, for nearly a century, generations of people have grown up with impeccable storytelling, beautiful animation, and catchy musical numbers of Disney animated films.

The 60th and latest feature from Walt Disney Animation Studios, Encanto, was released in theaters in November followed by its Disney+ release in December. The story, which follows a multi-generational Colombian family whose magical gifts help support the rural community known as the “Encanto”, received critical acclaim.

Along with it, the film generated numerous songs that have charted on the Billboard Hot 100, which calculates which songs are earning the most sales, radio play, and streaming.

This includes “Surface Pressure” at Number 9, “The Family Madrigal” at Number 20, “What Else Can I Do?” at Number 27, Number 36 for “Dos Oruguitas”, Number 48 for “Waiting on a Miracle” and “All of You” at Number 82.

As Billboard explains, the rankings specifically blend, “all-genre U.S. streaming (official audio and official video), radio airplay and sales data.” However, the song that has been the breakout hit is, “We Don’t Talk About Bruno”.

“We Don’t Talk About Bruno” has become the “first Disney song to top [the] Billboard Hot 100 in 29 years.” The last song to reach the top spot was “A Whole New World” from 1992’s Aladdin in 1993. This makes “A Whole New World” and “We Don’t Talk About Bruno” the only Disney songs to ever reach the top of the Billboard Hot 100 chart.

For those who remember the ubiquity of “Let It Go” from Frozen in 2014, while the song was a huge success, even winning an Academy Award for Best Original Song the same year, its peak was at number 5.

The entire Encanto soundtrack is successful, as well, as it has placed at the top of the Billboard 200, which ranks the highest albums in the nation, “for the third time in the last four weeks.” It has gone up 11% from the previous week, earning “115,000 album-equivalent units,” and continues to see a rise in percentage with each week.

As Yahoo! explains, the Lin-Manuel Miranda written song also makes “We Don’t Talk About Bruno”  the first song since Ed Sheeran’s “Perfect” in 2017 to be written by a solo writer. It is also Miranda’s first number one hit.

Miranda, who wrote eight songs that were on the Encanto soundtrack and in the film, explained to Billboard, “Your job as the musical dramatist in this room is to sort of say, here’s where I think music can elevate and help tell our story.” With the success of the songs and album, the music of Encanto has effectively told the story of the Madrigal family.

Miranda is also shocked that it was the song about the character Bruno that became the most popular. He told People, “I’m surprised it’s ‘Bruno’…I feel like this is my ‘Send in the Clowns,’ which was the late Stephen Sondheim’s biggest hit and probably the most random of an incredible career and life-making music. But I’ll take it!”

Another interesting fact about “We Don’t Talk About Bruno” is that it has reached the top of the Billboard Hot 100 chart with, “close to no radio play, which is highly unusual for a chart in which spins play a considerable factor.”

It makes another historic achievement with being the first song to reach number one with the highest amount of credited singers as the song is performed by multiple characters in the film. This includes Carolina Gaitán, Mauro Castillo, Adassa, Rhenzy Feliz, Diane Guerrero, and Stephanie Beatriz.

The song was the one to dethrone Adele’s “Easy on Me’ which has been at the top of the charts for ten weeks. “We Don’t Talk About Bruno” also raked in “34.9 million U.S. streams.”

While the song encourages there to be no talk about Bruno, there will be talk about the success of the song and its historic run.