Superhero movies have become big business. With so much of Hollywood dedicated to producing one franchise or another, it’s actually becoming difficult to find somebody who works either in front of, or behind, the camera that isn’t attached to the genre in some way. Composer Hans Zimmer has spent more than a decade with a particular focus on superhero movies, but now the prolific music maker says he’s done with superhero films. He simply doesn’t have anything left to say.
Hans Zimmer has been making music for movies since the late 1980’s and in that time, he has created some of the most memorable themes in recent memory. In 2005 he scored his first superhero movie when he began work on Christopher Nolan’s Batman Begins. He went on to score the entire trilogy for Nolan, as well as do the same thing for Man of Steel, The Amazing Spider-Man 2, and now, Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice. Zimmer now tells the BBC that he’s simply run out of music to create for superhero films, and he credits his collaborator for helping him get through this last project.
Oh, I might as well say it. I have officially retired from the superhero business. It’s just me. I started to find… This one was very hard for me to do. To try to find new language. To try to find … I did it in collaboration with a friend of mine, Tom Holkenborg [Junkie XL], who just did the Mad Max movies, and we’ve been friends forever. That was very important, to have another voice in here.
For a composer as prolific as Hans Zimmer, it’s honestly amazing that he can come up with any new ideas for a movie considering how much he has already created. Within the specific genre of the superhero movie, it’s not surprising that eventually one would just have difficulty finding something new to do with it. With the number of films that have been made around Batman and Superman in the past, nevermind the fact that Zimmer himself already scored several of them, it would be easy to find yourself thinking more of what you’d already done than of something new. When you’ve already created three themes for Batman how do you come up with an entirely different theme for the same character?
What this will do; however, is allow somebody new to come along with some fresh ideas for Wonder Woman and Justice League. What’s your favorite superhero movie score so far? Let us know in the comments.
