Okay, I have to give it up for this one. What a great idea.
While I understand that “Man Of Steel” isn't everyone's favorite, I am a huge fan of the film, and one of the things I love about it is the score by Hans Zimmer. There are places in that film where I think Zimmer does some of the best work of his career, big and inspired and beautiful and sweeping and intense and emotional.
It isn't a huge surprise to hear that Zimmer will be working on the score for “Batman v Superman: Dawn Of Justice” as well. I would expect him to continue from the themes that he created for “Man Of Steel,” and I assume he and Zack Snyder had a good relationship on that film. It would be enough of an announcement for me to think it was awesome if they just said Zimmer was working on the score. But it's more than that, something entirely appropriate to the nature of the film itself, and it sounds like a perfect idea.
Zimmer will only be scoring the Superman parts of the film, according to an interview he gave to Comic Book Resources, while Junkie XL is going to handle the Batman side of things, also scoring the movie. The idea of having two composer working against each other and together over the course of the film feeds directly into the nature of the film. I'm so excited to see how they do this, and how it plays into the action we'll see on film.
Recently, I feel like I've spent a lot of energy talking about how well Marvel has managed to set a standard that everyone else is following, and I've had some hard things to say about the Warner Bros/DC plan. I do feel like they're reacting to the decisions that Marvel's already made, and that's not a good way for any studio to work. But having said that, I am rooting for Snyder to make something that builds off of “Man Of Steel” in a very smart way.
The more we've heard about the film, the more it sounds like it's directly addressing some of the things that people complained about when they saw “Man Of Steel.” The one that I'm most entertained by is the massive destruction caused by the battle between Zod and Superman. It sounds, according to everyone who has broken their NDAs about working on the film, like Lex Luthor (played this time around by Jesse Eisenberg) and Bruce Wayne (Ben Affleck) are both forced to step in to help deal with the destruction How they do that remains to be seen, but it's still thrilling to hear.
Now they're going to have Zimmer just score the Superman parts of the score. Junkie XL, who have been working more and more frequently lately, will handle the Batman duties. The result should be a tension between the two composers, a back and forth between the themes composed for each character. When “The Avengers” was released, I was irritated by the way none of the scores seemed to blend into another. The score was fine, I guess, but if they had managed to give each of the individual heroes their own great, immediately recognizable themes, then it would have been great to hear all of those individual Marvel themes come together into one big amazing thing.
It sounds like Zack Snyder's got the right idea for how to make the score special, and I hope that the film itself plays with that tension between the two heroes in a way that is just as special.
“Batman v Superman: Dawn Of Justice” is in theaters March 25, 2016.