This is part of a series.
- Here’s the last post on Bad Boys for Life, Call of the Wild, etc. - https://www.filmtracks.com/scoreboard/forum.cgi?read=120057
- If you want the full set of links covering the Too Big To Fail era or earlier, click on my profile.

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Sonic the Hedgehog (2020) - ***½
Tom Holkenborg; add’l music by Antonio Di Iorio; orchestrated by Holkenborg, Edward Trybek, Henri
Wilkenson & Jonathan Beard; conducted by Edward Trybek; add’l synth programming by Sara Barone;
technical score consultants: Jacopo Trifone, Shwan Askari, Jarrod Royles-Atkins & Gevorg Chepchyan

TBTF discovery #77.

Tom Holkenborg “normally wouldn’t get approached to do a movie like” this live action adaptation of the famed racing hedgehog video game franchise, but the involvement of Deadpool producer Tim Miller and his assistant Jeff Fowler in his first directing gig ensured the composer got the job. He started going down a game music rabbit hole with his research, intending even on using some of his own vintage synths from 1983, but Fowler wanted to avoid the language and themes of the video game franchise. “Playing video game music was not helping with the storytelling. It would sound too small for the big action scenes, it would not cover enough emotion when Sonic is all alone.” Tom would end up blending a theme that ”is more poppy in nature” with some inspiration from Tom & Jerry cartoons. “Take the best bits of that, but then put it in a 2020 environment, because Scott [Bradley’s] music is absolutely great.” If you had ever wanted to hear Tom’s version of a Henry Jackman animation score, here it is.


Scoob! (2020) - ***½
Tom Holkenborg; orchestrated by Holkenborg, Edward Trybek, Henri Wilkenson
& Jonathan Beard; conducted by Conrad Pope; add’l synth programming by
Daniel Beijbom, Sara Barone, Shwan Askari & Jarrod Royles-Atkins

TBTF discovery #78

John Powell has occasionally joked about asking filmmakers how Carl Stalling-like his animated scores needed to be, but he never quite approached the Stalling number Tom Holkenborg did on Warner Animation’s reboot of the Scooby Doo franchise. His music goes less in the direction of the typical bustling house style of Dreamworks animation scores and more like a hybrid of a John Debney parody score mixed with Tom’s electronic heyday - beats, gnarly synths, and even a Dutch style of hardcore techno called Gabber. “The director asked me to do something new while honoring the original vibe of the TV series. We ended up fusing a lot of hip-hop beats with sixties psychedelic elements.” There are carnival antics, surf guitars, glorious choral explosions, theremin, ethnic woodwinds, horror synths, “flower power sounds, super fast Tom and Jerry orchestral music” (again), and possibly even a kitchen sink being hit. The all-over-the-place feel of it is bound to drive some listeners insane, and good luck keeping track of all the character themes. But if you can tolerate the absurdity of something like The Boss Baby then you’ll probably like this too.

Worth noting: with the exception of Sonic and maybe also Tomb Raider thanks to its smaller budget, all of the 2017-2020 films that made up Tom’s Adventures With Orchestra were commercial failures. It was tempting, especially for traditionalist score fans, to think that these scores (Alita in particular) were going to have significant implications for the music that filmmakers and studios asked him to write in the years to come. “It feels like a new time period where you’re growing into a new level of what you’re capable of, better combinations of styles and elements.” But remember that when people were banging down the doors to ask the composer to continue his Man of Steel and Mad Max sound it wasn’t just because some folks liked the music. It was also because those movies made money. It wasn’t like studios asked Trevor Rabin to write a bunch more scores in the style of The Great Raid and Flyboys after those films bombed in the mid-aughts.


Elephant (2020) - ****
Ramin Djawadi; add’l music by Brandon Campbell & William Marriott; orchestrated by
Stephen Coleman, Gernot Wolfgang & Michael J. Lloyd; orchestra conducted by Djawadi;
choir conducted by Jasper Randall; technical score advisor Garret Reynolds

Beat the Drum was covered here: https://www.filmtracks.com/scoreboard/forum.cgi?read=108458
African Safari was covered here: https://www.filmtracks.com/scoreboard/forum.cgi?read=117113

With the pandemic shutting down most of the U.S., Disney would drop two nature documentaries on its streaming service in early April: its long-delayed Dolphin Reef with an incredibly underrated score by Gravity composer Steven Price and this film about African elephants which was a somewhat surprising post-Thrones assignment for Ramin Djawadi. The pairing would be a bit of a reunion as Price and Djawadi were coworkers 15 years earlier on Batman Begins. Ramin’s score suggested the composer had taken some of things he’d learned on Beat the Drum and African Safari, as well as some of the world music elements he’d injected into Game of Thrones, and realized those on a much larger scale here. The music is often warm, vibrant, and consistently playful, with a sound that suggests less legacy MV / RC mannerisms and more James Newton Howard’s animated adventure fare and even some John Barry-style romanticism.


Westworld Season 3 (2020) - ***
Ramin Djawadi; add’l music by William Marriott; orchestrated
by Stephen Coleman; technical score advisor Garret Reynolds

TBTF discovery #79.

Season 1 was covered here: https://www.filmtracks.com/scoreboard/forum.cgi?read=117611
Season 2 was covered here: https://www.filmtracks.com/scoreboard/forum.cgi?read=119377

With HBO’s show departing its original park environments for a futuristic, mostly urban setting, Ramin’s music would become “very synthetic,” something closer to the halfway point between a Terminator score and Vangelis, and much more like the soundscapes of the scores he wrote before Game of Thrones. The shift made sense given the change in the aesthetic of the series, but it also resulted in music that was less beguiling than that of the prior seasons, and it was the only season of the show to not garner significant media attention for its instrumental covers of pop songs.


Extraction (2020) - **
Henry Jackman & Alex Belcher; add’l music by Maverick Dugger & Jon Monroe; score technical engineers Felipe Pacheco & John Paul Lefebvre; orchestrated by Stephen Coleman & Andrew Kinney; conducted by Gavin Greenaway

TBTF discovery #80.

This Netflix actioner by the Russo brothers would become a gigantic April streaming hit thanks to everyone being stuck at home. The Russos had used Henry Jackman on their Captain America films and brought him on board for more contemporary action material. Henry liked having a change of pace from symphonic blockbusters, just as Harry Gregson-Williams had opined in the aughts. “When I was 14, and you’d told me, ‘You’re doing Jumanji,’ I’d have laughed. But I don’t always get the time to do [other things]. The Russos have set up this other company for Sicario-type films.” The score is mainly a surly take on the chugging strings, drums, and thumps we’d all become used to in a post-Bourne score world. “[The character] fights with reckless abandon but basically doesn’t care about himself, [hence] large stretches of gnarly, unthematic, textural action music.” Reprieves come with subdued strings and piano that tell you it’s Inception Time (“recall moments of emotional pain”), as well as a finale that suggests The Dark Knight. The music was mostly inoffensively predictable, but the film’s success would be a huge boost for co-composer Alex Belcher who would graduate to leading his own droning action score for The Contractor two years later.


Mulan (2020) - ***½
Harry Gregson-Williams; add’l music by Stephanie Economou; orchestrated by Ladd McIntosh, Hal
Rosenfeld, Jennifer Hammond & Jim Honeyman; conducted by Gregson-Williams; specialist woodwinds
Chris Bleth & Richard Harvey; electric cell Marti Tillman; ‘Loyal Brave True’ by Gregson-Williams, Jamie
Hartman, Rosi Golan & Billy Crabtree; ‘Reflection (2020)’ produced by Gregson-Williams

“There’s no prize for being 100% authentic, otherwise they wouldn’t have hired me, they’d have hired Tan Dun.”

Disney’s new Mulan was intended as a spring blockbuster and had its premiere event in early March, but its release date was postponed due to the pandemic and the movie was eventually dropped onto Disney’s streaming service that fall. Funny enough, it was the third straight live action adaptation of a Disney animated film intended for theaters to be scored by a veteran of this musical lineage, following Hans’ Lion King re-do and Geoff Zanelli’s stellar work on the Maleficent sequel. As with Monkey Kingdom, Harry Gregson-Williams thought it would be nice to work on a film his daughters could watch, but he didn’t think he’d have a shot at it until Niki Caro, the helmer of The Zookeeper’s Wife, was hired. For score fans, this seemed awesome: a chance for Harry to return to the action/fantasy sound that had defined many of his best works in the aughts but hadn’t been on his resume since he returned from his hiatus. Caro even made it clear she wanted a big score instead of the understated accompaniment she’d asked for on The Zookeeper’s Wife.

Alas, the end result would be a mixed bag, perhaps in part driven by the film’s long pre-pandemic post-production process which featured some “recalibrating of the tone of the film” and thus required a number of rewrites on the composer’s part. Harry would throw a host of Chinese instruments into the mix (taking advantage of his friend and former boss Richard Harvey who was about to go record a number of ethnic instruments for a sample library) and produce a number of alluring passages. But the action material would often feel like a Far Eastern retread of Prince of Persia. Several score reviewers noticed likely coincidental similarities between Harry’s main melody and Rachel Portman’s from The Joy Luck Club, though for my money the more distracting similarity was how the music for the midfilm water bucket training sequence seemed to take heavy inspiration from Dario Marianelli’s music from V for Vendetta. And brief quotes of the famed song melodies from the 1998 animated film, done at the behest of Caro, didn’t quite gel with the rest of the material.


Wonder Woman 1984 (2020) - *****
Hans Zimmer; add’l music by David Fleming & Steve Mazzaro; sequencer programming Omer Benyamin & Steve
Doar; orchestrated by B&W Fowler/Moriarty, Kevin Kaska, Carl Rydlund, Jennifer Hammond & David Giuli; conducted
by Gavin Greenaway & Matt Dunkley; technical score engineer Chuck Choi; synth design Kevin Schroeder; electric &
acoustic cello Tina Guo; bass flute Pedro Eustache; digital instrument design Mark Wherry; digital instrument
preparation Taurees Habib & Raul Vega; RC studio manager Shalini Singh; Cynthia Park as Zimmer’s assistant

Wonder Woman was covered here: https://www.filmtracks.com/scoreboard/forum.cgi?read=118953

Director Patty Jenkins wanted Hans for the 2017 Wonder Woman film and probably could’ve gotten him if he wasn’t sick of superhero movies at the time. Still, it was a bit jolting that Hans took over the franchise from former underling Rupert Gregson-Williams in 2018, especially with Rupert having done a capable score for that monster hit. But folks got over that shock pretty quickly once they heard what Hans and team had come up with for the sequel. If the richly romantic music of Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End had felt like Hans saying to the naysayers, “Fine, you want your pirate music, here’s your pirate music,” then Wonder Woman 1984 was its superhero equivalent. Were you tired of bass strings and grim ostinatos and all the brooding? Didn’t like the EDM in Amazing Spider-Man 2? Hated most of Batman v Superman? Fine. Here’s your superhero score.

And it was effing awesome.

There were two catchy new themes for the title character that unleashed rousing, major key heroism at speaker-shaking volumes. There was a female chorus injecting a surprising amount of optimism, like Hans putting a happy spin on Angels and Demons. There were many impressive lengthy action sequences that lacked the overproduced heaviness of Man of Steel and BvS and instead showed a surprising level of instrumental richness in the soundscape; Wonder Woman 1984 was possibly the next major score Zimmer recorded after the “live action” The Lion King, and it shares - and arguably surpasses - that score’s level of symphonic orchestration (check out that layered brass in Fireworks and the second half of 1984). Zimmer and Jenkins may have agreed that his war cry theme from BvS wasn’t versatile enough to be a big hero theme, but that doesn’t mean he discarded it; its 7/8 time signature informed a lot of the action material, and the ass-kicking Open Road prominently featured the idea.

There are a wealth of secondary ideas. The theme for the villain Maxwell Lord would start as an amusingly pseudo-baroque variant on Zimmer’s mannerisms from his early days before being twisted into darker and sadder versions. The love theme would be a throwback Media Ventures gem. And the abrasive theme for the villainess Cheetah would be cleverly similar to the first four notes of the war cry theme, something Zimmer hadn’t really done since his villain theme mirrored his hero theme in Angels and Demons. Many thought the score was the finest accomplishment of Hans’ career since Inception, and possibly even since At World’s End, and it would net Hans his first trophy from the IFMCA since Interstellar. It’s debatable whether Hans cared about the last part, since at his kindest he’s referred to film score critics as “academic fanboys.” The film’s mixed reception and direct-to-HBO Max release in December 2020 perhaps muted the score’s ability to have a bigger impact on the culture at large.

Zimmer didn’t factor much into the promotion of the film. He filmed a cheesy video with Jenkins and Gal Gadot (and with Steve Mazzaro and Dave Fleming standing quietly in the background) to introduce his new main theme, but to date the only interview I’ve seen evidence of is a Q&A Hans did with film music journalist Jon Burlingame that’s currently behind a paywall on the website of the Society of Composers and Lyricists. It’s possible that temp tracking led to some frustration. Beautiful Lie from BvS was used in a late scene as Jenkins would claim Zimmer and team tried writing multiple versions to replace it but ultimately gave up after they couldn’t get anything she liked as much, and two pre-existing tracks by non-RC film composers are in the final cut of the film as well. Hans also indicated there were some last-minute recordings done after “Patty had some more ideas.”

Maybe he was annoyed that it went to streaming. Maybe Warner didn’t pay him to promote it beyond the video. Or maybe he was just busy! When Wonder Woman 1984 came out that winter, Top Gun: Maverick was slated for a summer 2021 release and Dune was due to come out only a few months after that. Lots to be done.

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If you’re thinking to yourself, “Wait a minute…At World’s End didn’t get five stars, WTF,” then

A) You might be paying too much attention to this and should seek more meaningful distractions and/or medical help.

B) You’re right! When I did a concurrent rundown of all my 5-star scores I realized it was better than, uh, several of them. So I’d for sure give the score top marks now, even with its minor issues.

C) Paycheck should’ve gotten five stars too. Oh well. Can’t get all of these right on the first try.

D) This arguably checks the box on the original kernel of an idea that led to this rundown: me wondering in early 2021 how WW84 would stack up against various Hans scores I hadn’t heard in years. Better late than never, I suppose.

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Next time: “It all went to crap from there.” Pandemic era composing and recording begins, and this rundown covers 2021, 2022, and possibly 2023. It will end at some point, but perhaps not before its first birthday.