Songfacts®:

• This was the theme song to the movie The Legend of Billie Jean, which was a box office bomb despite the success of this song. The 1985 film stars two unrelated Slaters: Helen and Christian. They play siblings who go on the run after an accidental shooting and are portrayed as delinquents in the news media. Benatar's rousing tune is fitting for Billie Jean, who refuses to back down.
• Simon Climie and Holly Knight wrote this empowerment anthem. Climie's songwriting credits include "I Knew You Were Waiting (For Me)" by George Michael and Aretha Franklin, and "Ecstasy" by Jeff Beck. Knight wrote Benatar's 1983 hit "Love Is A Battlefield."
  
  In a Songfacts interview with Holly Knight, she says of "Invincible": "I love that song. It's one of my favorite songs. I'd love to hear that song cut by an alternative band, like Foo Fighters or something."
• The song makes an appearance in the 2017 season finale of GLOW, which is set in the '80s. It plays in a scene where the main characters wrestle.
• Pat Benatar hated The Legend of Billie Jean and let people know it. Before launching into "Invincible" in concert, she often said, "This is from one of the worst movies ever made." Rumor has it, the movie took so long to get a DVD release because the singer refused to sign off on the rights.
• Yeardley Smith, who went on to voice Lisa Simpson on The Simpsons, stars in the movie as Billie Jean's teenage friend who tags along with the fugitives and gets an unexpected surprise from Mother Nature. Helen Slater says hearing Benatar's song "will always take me back to a part in the movie where Lisa Simpson gets her period."
• Holly Knight was given the script before she started writing the song, and the story of a young female vigilante fighting for justice sparked her imagination. "I always find it easier to come up with a song title with a script because there's a direction to follow," she told Songwriter Universe.
• With Seven the Hard Way (and her previous album, Tropico), Benatar was trying to overhaul her image from a Spandex-clad pop-rocker who challenged "Hit Me With Your Best Shot" to a serious, more introspective artist. Despite being a throwback to her old style, she still included the Billie Jean anthem on the album. "It doesn't really fit with the rest of the record," she told Billboard, "but I thought it was a good song. I like a lot of things that Holly writes."
• Benatar regards Seven the Hard Way as an awful record that was a nightmare to record. It was only a moderate success compared to her previous releases, peaking at #26 on the albums chart and selling just enough copies (500,000) to make gold. She told The Believer: "There were probably two songs on there that belonged there, and the other ones should either never have gone on there or they should have been left alone to wait to evolve into a better thing than what they were. And you know what? It was the costliest record we ever did and it sold the least. And they got exactly what they deserved: s--t. Okay? Unfortunately, I did also."
• This earned Benatar a Grammy nomination for Best Rock Vocal Performance, Female, in 1985. She lost to Tina Turner for "One Of The Living," also co-written by Holly Knight.
• In 2022, Pat Benatar's songs were featured in the stage production Invincible - The Musical, a twist on the Romeo and Juliet story. It ran at the Wallis Theater in Beverly Hills, California, and was reworked as an off-Broadway production in 2024.