This is part of a series.
- Here’s the prior post on various 2023 scores - https://www.filmtracks.com/scoreboard/forum.cgi?read=131498
- If you want the full set of links, click on my profile.

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With the twin Hollywood strikes resolved in fall 2023, America’s screen entertainment industry got back to work, and many of the major films and shows that had their releases delayed finally came out in 2024. It may have felt like there was less content (and indeed several upcoming works had their release dates bumped to 2025 or later), but billion dollar blockbusters were back in business.

The Hans lineage was back in business too. By the middle of January 2025, of the fifteen highest-grossing 2024 films per worldwide box office earnings seven involved Hans, someone who used to work for him, or one of their former assistants. Streaming numbers are often a bit harder to parse, but it seems many of the most-watched shows globally had someone from this crew doing the music as well. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Or did they?

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For how much Tom Holkenborg had going on in 2024, his output didn’t exactly return him to the limelight as many anticipated. There was the music for Ubisoft’s pirate video game Skull and Bones, where the raw sampled sounds and pounding drums called to mind his mid-2010s sound before his Adventures With Orchestra period (the only indication that it didn’t come from his earlier days is that the credited rosters of assistants is his current crew), but the inferior game sank on arrival and all the media attention focused on its notoriously troubled production process. There was also music for Zack Snyder’s limply received continuation of his Netflix sci-fi actioner Rebel Moon. The 2023 entry Part One: A Child of Fire had resulted in a folksy, new age variant on Tom’s bludgeoning action sound that was easily the most palatable of his Snyder scores on album, and Part Two: The Scargiver provided more of the same. As with Skull and Bones, no specific interviews with Tom popped up for this one. Heck, even his Sonic the Hedgehog 3 score seemed to pass by with little notice despite the movie being a financial success and Tom replacing the cheaper sound of the 2022 sequel with his most robustly orchestral material since his 2017-2020 output.*
*Not to mention that the spinoff Knuckles miniseries had a more traditional orchestral adventure sound done not by any of Tom’s assistants but by Tom Howe.

No one seemed to care to talk to Tom about the monster mashup sequel Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire either, odd given how many interviews he did for 2021’s Godzilla vs. Kong and the sequel’s goliath box office earnings. Never mind that many traditionalist score fans felt the new themes, more muscular orchestral presence, and energetic synths seemed to remove the bad taste left by its cheap-sounding predecessor, even if that pivot seemed to anonymize the concept a bit (you could’ve fooled me into thinking Lorne Balfe’s crew wrote this). But the lack of attention was perhaps because Tom had little to nothing to do with it. Antonio Di Iorio, Tom’s former lead assistant who had a hand in much of the Godzilla vs. Kong score (and likely was a key part of Tom’s 2017-2020 orchestral evolution) but had since been supporting the likes of Pinar Toprak and Henry Jackman, was credited as a co-composer and perhaps should have been the sole credited composer given the way he talked about his work: building on the musical foundation he established, the seven new themes he composed, the sounds and synth riffs he experimented with. Not to mention that their reunion was short-lived as Di Iorio confirmed they’d “mutually parted ways again.”

The one exception to this was of course Tom’s return to the wasteland with the Mad Max: Fury Road prequel Furiosa. That score’s tidal wave of press coverage was justifiable considering how that 2015 score had raised Tom’s profile, but you wonder if those interview requests would’ve come in if all the interviewers had actually heard the new score on album. The film consciously avoided the rampaging attitude of its predecessor, taking place over decades instead of dramatizing a chase over a couple of days, and Miller was explicit that the music should follow that by largely eschewing the drums for days “rock opera” feel of the last entry in favor of what Tom called something more “restrained” and “elemental.” A duduk and a didgeridoo were some of the few organic exceptions to the soundscape, though even those ultimately blended in with the ambient, primordial murk that defined much of his composition, supported by AI-powered manipulations (e.g., drums warped to sound like guitar) and a 1960s synth generating dark, distorted sounds from remixes of orchestral instruments playing “very experimental notation.”

Tom went into the same kinds of rationalizations Hans had used for Dune, musing on how the residents of this post-apocalyptic environment would have never heard a string section before (“you’re not going to write lyrical music because that’s not what a six-year-old girl would be hearing”) and how they shouldn’t play up any emotions when the protagonist isn’t expressing any, and in another instance bringing up that he and Miller had been referencing older chase movies that didn’t have omnipresent music like Bullitt. But citing Bullitt seemed a puzzling choice given how distinctive Lalo Schifrin’s great score was outside of that movie’s famed climactic chase. And the decision not just to jettison nearly every aspect of traditional symphonic scoring but also to have the music underplay nearly every aspect of the film ended up doubling down on the film’s chilly demeanor, a problematic choice in what seemed to be intended as a kind of character study. Vast portions of the score in context seem little more than bass thumping, even during some action scenes, thanks to Tom’s desire to have a heartbeat effect akin to “music that is felt but not heard.” But there’s a difference between being unsentimental and making the audience care less, and in forgetting that Tom and George Miller - even in their noble intent to avoid repeating themselves - accidentally summoned the anti-score.


Sonic the Hedgehog 3 - ***½ - Tom Holkenborg; add’l music by Ching-Shan Chang,
Jack Roberts, Luca Fagagnini & Berend Salverda; orchestrated by Holkenborg, Edward Trybek,
Henri Wilkinson & Jonathan Beard; conducted by Gavin Greenaway; technical score engineer Michael Staffeldt

Rebel Moon - Part Two: The Scargiver - *** - Tom Holkenborg; add’l music by Ching-Shan Chang,
Dallin Burns, Jack Roberts, Luca Fagagnini & Rafael Frost; From Far theme by Rose Betts; orchestrated by Holkenborg,
Edward Trybek, Henri Wilkinson & Jonathan Beard; assistant orchestrators Benjamin Hoff & Jamie Thierman;
conducted by Gavin Greenaway; technical score engineer Gevorg Chepchyan; violin/viola Peter Lale & Tom Pigott-Smith;
vocalists Sumudu Jayatilaka, Sam Oladeinde & Giulia Vallisari; steel string acoustic guitar John Parracelli

Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire - *** - Tom Holkenborg & Antonio Di Iorio;
additional music by Jarrod Royles-Atkins & Shwan Askari; orchestrated by Holkenborg,
Edward Trybek, Henri Wilkinson & Jonathan Beard; conducted by Bernhard Melbye Voss

Skull and Bones - ** - Tom Holkenborg; add’l synth programming by Dallin Burns,
Ching-Shan Chang, Nicholas O’Toole & Jack Roberts; music supervisor Manu Bachet;
technical score engineers Gevorg Chepchyan & Peter Kohrman

Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga - * - Tom Holkenborg; orchestrated by Edward Trybek,
Henri Wilkinson & Jonathan Beard; conducted by Christopher Gordon; duduk by Pedro
Eustache; didgeridoo by William Barton; solo vocals Jessica Meier; technical score
engineers Gevorg Chepchyan, Luca Fagagnini & Michael Staffeldt

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While the early part of the decade saw Jacob Shea perhaps trying to pivot from being predominantly known as a nature documentary composer, the last two years have seen him run right back to that nature boy brand, first with Planet Earth III and now with the BBC’s Asia miniseries. Co-scored with Laurentia Editha, a Bleeding Fingers coworker with additional music credits on Frozen Planet II and Planet Earth III, the music pivoted a bit from the ambient world music and sound design of Shea’s last two such scores to more of a something-for-everyone approach: sweeping orchestral material, Hans-esque walls of sound, a Spaghetti Western pastiche, some Thomas Newman-style quirkiness here, some James Horner-style ethereal sound there, specialty instruments from the region everywhere, and so on. Those looking for a more electronic version of this material could indulge in the series of short, soothing pieces Jacob and Sara Barone wrote for a classroom version of the popular sandbox video game Minecraft via an album that most score fans understandably missed out on just as they did for the similar one done two years earlier for Frozen Planet II.


Asia - *** - Jacob Shea & Laurentia Editha; add’l music by Stewart Mitchell; score
technical assistants Elizabeth Becker, Aarya Ganesan, Lauryn Vania Kurniawan & Erik Cuottolenc

Minecraft Education: Planet Earth III - **½ - Jacob Shea & Sara Barone

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Next time:
- “Purposely dial back the score so that it didn’t get in the way.”
- “The way the movie’s structured, there’s not a lot of room for big, sweeping themes.”