> 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.
> -----------------------
> 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
I'd probably bump up Mufasa to 4, though I haven't relistened to it since putting it in my top 5 of the year. Moana 2 is probably accurate - haven't heard it on it's own, but my kids have made me watch the movie three times this past week, so I've gotten a good feel for it (unfortunately).
Juror #2 I gave up halfway through, and I'm the only guy here who liked Cry Macho. Didn't really notice it in context so, yeah, your rating is probably accurate.
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