Hans Zimmer is one of the most prolific composers in all of film. He's made the music for many of your favorite movies, but he says he's not going to do superhero movies anymore, and that's all because of Ben Affleck. Well, it's not so much about Ben specifically as it is the fact that Zimmer spent so long making music for Christopher Nolan's Dark Knight trilogy that when it came time to make the music for Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, he had trouble doing it because he liked Christian Bale's Batman more.
I spent months trying to come up with something for Ben. The Batman that I know and the one I learned is the one that Christian did, and Ben plays it differently. And I can't quite shake that off. For me, the Christian Bale character was always completely unresolved. It was always about that moment at the beginning of the first movie, where he sees his parents getting killed. It was basically arrested development. The Ben character is more middle-aged, he seems to be grumpy as hell but I didn't feel the pain that I felt in Christian's performance. And it was that pain that made be interested.
One of the biggest issues with making Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice so soon after the conclusion of The Dark Knight Rises is that so many movie fans had Christian Bale fixed in their minds as the on-screen Batman. Ben Affleck's version needed to be different if for no other reason than to prevent people from claiming the character was just a copy. However, many fans still prefer Bale's version of the character and based on his comments to Inverse, Hans Zimmer is one of them.
Because Ben Affleck's Batman is different from Christian Bale's, the music needed to be different as well. Apparently, Hans Zimmer just couldn't reconcile the two different versions of the character, and so he had trouble making music for the recent film. It was apparently for this reason that Junkie XL was brought in. By adding somebody to the music team that didn't have Zimmer's baggage, they were able to take a fresh look at the movie and come up with fresh music.
This inability to easily put together music for Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice has apparently led Hans Zimmer to more or less swear off superhero movies. It may be for the best. Character reboots are becoming par for the course with the genre, so it's likely that this problem will only get worse, not better, as time goes on. Zimmer says he has a loyalty to Christian Bale's Batman that he just couldn't get past and as other film's get rebooted, he may have that problem more and more.
It just did my brain in to have written Christian Bale as Batman, and suddenly it's Ben Affleck [in Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice]. And it felt like I was betraying everything Christian had done. So there's a certain amount of loyalty attached to those movies, as well.
It's not uncommon for fans to feel loyalty to an older version of a character when a newer one comes along, but it's surprising that this same feeling can actually impact the final product of somebody who works in the business. The good news is that we still have all of Hans Zimmer's old work on superhero movies that we can enjoy whenever we want to remember the old Batman.
