Just as the Batman vs. Superman talk was starting to ramp up last autumn, one key piece in the puzzle remained up in the air: whether Hans Zimmer was going to come back to score the next film in the universe he helped create. The last we had heard was that Zimmer was not terribly interested in coming back, mostly because he felt like he’d be plagiarizing his work from Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight saga. In fact he’d even gone as far as saying that his best contribution to the project would be to tell Zack Snyder to find someone else to do it.
Well, now it looks like the Man of Steel director has found his new composer! And you'll never guess who it is. Digital Spy has announced that the composer for Batman vs. Superman is up-and-coming composer… Hans Zimmer.
In a short six months, we’ve gone from Zimmer not even being asked to score the film to making a 180-degree turn right back to bringing Zimmer back into the fold. In the interview, Zimmer admitted:
"We've already had a couple of chats, and once I finish the movie that I shall not talk about I will probably head over to where Zack is shooting his movie and just hang out a bit and see if we can come up with any ideas,"
By the way, the movie that Zimmer’s talking about not talking about is, of course, Interstellar. So it looks like as soon as his duties are finished on Christopher Nolan’s latest secret project, he’ll head back to the Batcave of Solitude to compose the score to the biggest superhero showdown fans have wanted to see since The Avengers. As committed as Zimmer seems to the project, he still sounds a little apprehensive, as he further notes in his interview.
"That's my problem, that's my dilemma. I don't want to betray, if that's the right word, the Dark Knight movies. That was Christian, it was Christian's role."
When it comes to movie music, Hans Zimmer is a name worthy of the same adulation that’s visited upon John Williams, Jerry Goldsmith, and more recently Michael Giacchino. His work on The Dark Knight, or any Nolan film for that matter, especially stands out in the most recent phase of his career. His theme for Man of Steel not only managed to distance itself safely from the iconic John Williams theme of the 1978 original, it was actually rather memorable in its own right. It’s no question that Hans Zimmer can write a memorable tune, and he could easily throw something together for Batman vs. Superman. Despite the fact that he’s not above plagiarizing his own work, as he re-hashed some of his Inception music for 12 Years A Slave, it’s good to see that he’s not angling for what promises to be an awesome paycheck and a pretty guaranteed spot in the DC Universe’s firmament.
Instead he actually cares that he still has ideas left to bring to the table, especially since this is in a similar universe to the one he and Nolan co-created not too long ago. For now, let’s hope that he’s still got some of the juice that created the Man of Steel theme left in the tank. Batman vs. Superman tries to best Captain America 3 on May 6th, 2016.
