> Maleficent: Mistress of Evil (2019) - ****½

> With the fifth Pirates film, it made tons of sense for Geoff
> Zanelli to continue using the legacy themes of the franchise. Few walked
> into the Maleficent sequel thinking the composer would show any
> fealty to the sensational music from the first film by James Newton
> Howard, especially since much of the creative team was different this
> time. The new director this go-round was Joachim Rønning, who’d helmed
> that aforementioned Pirates sequel and clearly loved working with
> Zanelli since he brought him along for this film. So it was a welcome
> surprise for the composer to not only bring back Howard’s themes (avoiding
> a sense of cut-and-paste, just as he’d done on Dead Men Tell No
> Tales) but also write in a style that wouldn’t have been out of place
> with Howard’s material for Maleficent and other fantasy films.
> “Star Wars, Harry Potter, and Jurassic Park [are]
> strengthened by having continuity. The first thing we did when I sat down
> with Joachim was to determine if there’s material from the first movie to
> apply to this one. Some of the classic Disney fairy tale [feel] holds
> over, [so I used] some of the themes or just my own approach that honors
> that.”

All this helps explain why it's one of the best ever loyal sequels by a new composer, and I don't know if any of the other great ones is for a score I love as much as Maleficent. That factor makes it twice the pleasant surprise and makes me wonder what it might've been like to hear similarly successful follow-ups to other favorite scores of mine.

> It was one of the least Remote Control-ey scores a Remote Control
> graduate had ever written

Think something like Don't Worry Darling probably has it beat here.

> With this score, Dead Man Tell No Tales, and the train sequence in The
> Lone Ranger coming in a six-year stretch, Zanelli had clearly
> announced that he could be a significant contributor to blockbuster films,
> not to mention he’d successfully scored one of the biggest miniseries of
> the decade with The Pacific near the start of the decade. It’s a
> dang shame that he hasn’t gotten similar opportunities in the years since,
> though Rønning’s rumored involvement in an upcoming third TRON film
> suggests that may change in the near term.

Absolutely. It's so strange given he was entrusted with such big films fairly recently. Such a bummer, the way Hollywood works.