The songs that give any film Power

Kanye West’s “Power” song made its latest appearance on the new trailer for the Mark Wahlberg thriller Broken City (Reuters)

Some songs just work in trailers. Think of Where the Wild Things Are soundtracked solely by Arcade Fire's "Wake Up", or Trent Reznor's take on Led Zep's "Immigrant Song" for David Fincher's The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.

Some songs are such good trailer fodder that they cast their spell over multiple movies. Take Kanye West's "Power", which made its latest appearance on the new trailer for the Mark Wahlberg thriller Broken City last week.

Broken City is the story of a mayor (Russell Crowe) abusing his office, so as well as being a thrilling song, it helps that the chorus of Kanye's track – "no one man should have all that power" – handily sums up the plot. You can see similar literalness in the trailer for 2011's Limitless, in which Bradley Cooper plays a man who takes a drug which makes its users super-bright and, subsequently, too powerful. Ditto the early trails for The Social Network, the story of how Mark Zuckerberg came to own the wedding pictures of a seventh of the world's population. With Kanye and Jay-Z's "No Church in the Wild" also used in trails for The Great Gatsby and Safe House, it seems like West is the go-to man for studios trying to sell their films. Should one man have all that power?