“I have officially retired from the superhero business,” Hans Zimmer declared last spring, after his final spandex work (for now) on “Batman v Superman: Dawn Of Justice.” However, he’s cooled down a bit, and Zimmer is keeping the door open on superheroes, but it’s going to have to be something outstanding for him to consider doing it.
In an interview with Inverse, the composer explains why he initially decided to place a ban on superhero flicks, and his new role going forward when those opportunities present themselves,
“I keep thinking about new styles of music and new ways of using technology, new ways of figuring out how to make everything that we do an experience for other people. And I just couldn’t do it anymore with the superhero movies, it’s as simple as that,” Zimmer said. “If you take the three Chris Nolan Batmans, that’s three movies to you, but to [me] and Chris, it was twelve years of our lives. So sometimes you just have to say, ‘I don’t know where I’m heading, but I’m going to jump off this cliff.’ As soon as I said [no more superhero movies], there were a lot of phone calls coming my way going, ‘Are you crazy?’ But I’ve never written music for money; money isn’t inspiring. And I didn’t want to get into it where it became a job.”
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“Ron Howard actually said something very smart to me. He said, ‘Don’t say you will never do a superhero movie again, wait for somebody to turn up with an amazing script for a superhero movie.’ And I suppose that’s what I’m saying: Can I please have the amazing script?” he added.
One has to wonder if Zack Snyder‘s film broke Zimmer. He went into it with the intention of splitting duties with Junkie XL, with the Zimmer taking on the cues for Superman, and his partner doing the material for The Dark Knight. The project wound up turning into a full blown collaboration, but Zimmer makes it clear that Christian Bale will always be his Batman.
“It just did my brain in to have written Christian Bale as Batman, and suddenly it’s Ben Affleck. 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,” he explained.
“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,” Zimmer said. “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.”
Zimmer may not have realized he’s just set off a huge fanboy argument with those comments. Thoughts? Let us know below.
He’s right. Affleck did a more than serviceable job as Batman but the inconsistent writing for that character (and many others) killed any momentum that story tried building up. Whereas Zimmer witnessed a full character development with the Dark Knight trilogy, Affleck’s Batman is already an established character, which is fine in itself, but sudden tonal shifts and inherently flawed characteristic choices during BvS made it difficult to attach to that character in that universe.