This is part of a series.
- Here’s the prior post on various 2024 scores - https://www.filmtracks.com/scoreboard/forum.cgi?read=139145
- If you want the full set of links, click on my profile.

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Two of Mark Mancina’s three 2024 films almost seemed like inversions of each other; Clint Eastwood’s Juror #2 received a trivial theatrical release before Warner Bros. dumped it onto its Max streaming service while Moana 2 started off as a streaming miniseries before Disney changed its mind mid-production (only a year before its debut) and pivoted making it a big Thanksgiving theatrical release, the latter a sound decision as that movie became Mouse House’s third 2024 release to make over a billion dollars in theaters worldwide. The music of Juror #2 was unsurprisingly mundane, the score needing to be there mostly as a kind of a mood amplification for a chatty courtroom drama in alignment with Eastwood’s general preference for unobtrusive material, though Mark suggested being assigned to a film of its caliber was reward enough (not too far removed from how Hans often framed working with Steve McQueen). “The great thing about scoring a movie with that level of acting from the whole cast, you don’t have to push the music too hard and help convince anyone that they're watching great performances.” Mark’s music for their earlier dusty collaboration Cry Macho was practically ebullient by comparison, though Juror 2 did have some intriguingly atypical mixing choices, the cellos being put in the middle and the violins on the side to make things feel “a little uneven.”

Moana 2 suffered from the absence of Lin-Manuel Miranda, busy on other projects including another Disney one that would eventually pull Mark in as well, with the new songs by Emily Bear (who arose as a child prodigy and in more recent years had started to make her way as a film composer) not coming anywhere close to the aspirational power of How Far I’ll Go. One has to wonder if the late game revisions to the concept played a part in this. Mark confirmed that all but one song written for the TV series version was discarded, and he and his assistant Marlon Espino only had five months to do the score. “They moved up the schedule, [but] we didn’t get the movie until May. We [found] ourselves with months to do what took us three years before. It was kind of a mess.” Adding to the chaos was that Mark was concurrently mixing the songs for another Disney musical. Almost by necessity, they chose to build on the oceanic style they’d developed for the 2016 movie while eschewing their earlier score melodies, the latter no great loss as their prior score had intentionally taken a secondary role to the songs. Mark tried to get the arrangements for the songs to feel like they existed in the same sonic world as the score, but he attributed the limited melodic overlap between score and songs to the more complex harmonies of the new songs, though one gets the sense that the compressed timeline may have been not given him the capacity to experiment with further integration. Expect a workmanlike effort on the whole, one supporting individual scenes capably but not quite congealing into a powerful musical narrative.

Mark’s third film from 2024 took years to even reveal that he was involved. A Disney investor call in 2020 announced that Hans and Pharrell, the key musical names behind the company’s 2019 remake of the original Lion King, would be involved in a new prequel film along with Nicholas Britell who’d scored all prior feature films and miniseries for Barry Jenkins, the helmer of the 2016 Best Picture winner Moonlight and the director on this new film. At the end of a summer 2022 interview focused on the music of the HBO series Succession Britell mentioned that he’d been iterating on ideas on and off with Jenkins throughout the first half of the year. A first look trailer released in April 2024 revealed Mark, a bizarre omission from the 2019 remake, would be helping to produce new songs by Lin-Manuel Miranda, who the director knew from considering casting him in his 2018 movie If Beale Street Could Talk and apparently had brought on board back in 2021. Later comments by Mark suggested that he may not have been involved anywhere close to the start of production though, as he talked about having Clint Eastwood walk into his studio during a jam session with Lin-Manuel and Lebo M (Juror #2 started filming in summer 2023 and its post-production reportedly wrapped in April 2024). When Pharrell stopped being involved, or indeed if he even actually ended up working on the movie, is not clear.

Then in September 2024 it came out that longtime composer, orchestrator, and arranger Dave Metzger was doing the score instead of the two previously announced composers, taking his career a bit full circle as he’d started working with Mark and Lebo M back in the mid-90s during the making of the stage musical version of The Lion King. Dave came on board to what was now called Mufasa: The Lion King in April 2024 and saw it as his job to create new themes, provide some linkage to Lin-Manuel’s new songs (especially I Always Wanted A Brother) and give several of them new arrangements, and ensure enough of Hans’ identities were present throughout the movie so that “everybody knew that we were in this world.” A handful of Nicholas Britell cues remained in the film (he got an additional music credit), as did one very short Hans track with Lebo M. But otherwise the massive score was entirely by Dave.

There’s not enough on the public record to make this a kind of spiritual sequel to Top Gun: Maverick, another multiyear saga of multiple artists being shuffled in and out of songs and score for a decades-later feature continuation of a popular film. Still, Barry Jenkins made several comments to suggest that the four-year filmmaking process hadn’t been entirely satisfying for him, saying at one point he’d never make a fully CGI movie ever again. A director’s preferred composer being rotated out is never a sign that he still has 100% control over his movie, something also suggested by the darker tone of the movie’s initial trailer being replaced by a brighter, family-friendly adventure feel in a subsequent trailer that came out closer to the movie’s release date (it was also confirmed he didn’t have final cut authority). And Dave Metzger also noted that one of the key edicts for him was “to make sure that the viewer feels that they are very much a part of The Lion King, that we haven’t abandoned that,” thus implying that the majority of Nicholas Britell’s material was the opposite of that. It’s entirely possible that Britell’s schedule may not have allowed him to re-do his score at this time, especially with season 2 of Disney’s Andor on the horizon. Bizarrely, Hans - perhaps the most interviewed film music composer of his age - seemed to have said nothing publicly about his experiences, which was also true of his experiences on Top Gun: Maverick outside of talking about the Lady Gaga song and Lorne Balfe taking over. It would be a stretch to say the film was completely taken away from the director, as Dave talked about him providing input on individual cues, but all of the above is enough to fuel speculation that the release delay for Mufasa: The Lion King (moving in late 2023 from a summer 2024 debut to the Friday before Christmas) may not have been entirely due to the recent actor and writer strikes in Hollywood like the studio claimed it was.

If you thought the big orchestral statements of Hans’ Mufasa theme in the 2019 photorealistic version of The Lion King were some of that score’s best assets, then you’ll likely find parts of Dave’s score for the prequel to be a treat, the legacy themes occupying less than 20% of the music per his estimate but still delivering a mighty punch when they appear in various richly orchestrated appearances. In an era where Hans and his team have often trended towards soundscapes, it was nice in 2024 to get a reminder that Hans was a damn good theme writer in his early days. Those impressive appearances do have the unfortunate effect of overwhelming the rest of the score though; the composer made full and occasionally quite impressive use of his orchestra, specialty soloists and percussion, and choir, firmly planting us not just once again in the Pridelands but comfortably in the realm of robust Disney adventure music, but the material outside of references to 1994 melodies didn’t quite set itself apart with distinction. Not helping matters were that none of the new songs were earworms, Lin-Manuel providing the lyric and rhythmic complexity he’s known for but falling a little short in the memorability department. Say what you will about Elton John’s fairly detached role in the production of the 1994 film, but at least he gave Hans and Mark the foundational elements to come up with some classic tunes. With the film being lucrative but also on track to fall rather short of being the fourth 2024 release to cross the billion-dollar blockbuster threshold for the Mouse House, only time will tell if the movie’s music ends up enduring for decades like its predecessor’s has.


Mufasa: The Lion King - ***½ - Dave Metzger; songs co-composed by Lin-Manuel Miranda & Lebo M;
songs orchestrated by Melissa Orquiza, Dave Metzger & David Giuli; songs produced by Lin-Manuel Miranda &
Mark Mancina; music production and add’l engineering by Marlon E. Espino; score orchestrated by Dave Metzger &
David Giuli; add’l orchestrators in film credits Richard Bronskill & Matt Dunkley; horn arranger Tommy Laurence;
songs conducted by Nick Glennie-Smith; score conducted by James Shearman; choir conductor Ben Parry;
choral conductor Lebo M; add’l music by Nicholas Britell; And So It’s Time by Hans Zimmer & Lebo M

Moana 2 - *** - Mark Mancina; add’l music by Marlon E. Espino; lead orchestrator Larry Rench; score
orchestrated by Penka Kouneva & Steven Rader; MIDI orchestrator Jake Monaco; add’l MIDI orchestration Jose Kropp;
songs co-composed and co-produced by Mark Mancina, Opetaia Foa’i, Abigail Barlow & Emily Bear; songs orchestrated
by Mike Watts; score conducted by Pete Anthony & Kurt Crowley; songs conducted by Pete Anthony

Juror #2 - ** - Mark Mancina; add’l by Marlon E. Espino; lead orchestrator Larry Rench;
orchestrated by Penka Kouneva; add’l orchestration by Sandrine Rudaz & Zbigniew Szczerbetka;
solo cello Marta Bagratuni; solo guitar David Levita; solo piano Mark Mancina; feat. violin Helen Nightengale

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Next time:
- “You're able to subvert everything [without being] winky-winky.”
- “The clothes they wear sort of informed the kinds of sounds I wanted to use.”