Having scored Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight Trilogy, Hans Zimmer turns his hand to another incarnation of the Caped Crusader last year, collaborating with Junkie XL on the score to Zack Snyder’s Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, before announcing his retirement from superhero movies.
Well, it seems that Batman v Superman contributed to Zimmer’s decision to call it a day, with the composer telling Inverse that he struggled to get away with Ben Affleck’s Batman compared to Christian Bale’s take on the Dark Knight.
“It just did my brain in to have written Christian Bale as Batman, and suddenly it’s Ben Affleck. And it felt like I was betraying everything Christian had done. So there’s a certain amount of loyalty attached to those [Nolan] movies, as well. The Batman that I know and the one I learned is the one that Christian did, and Ben plays it differently. And I can’t quite shake that off. For me, the Christian Bale character was always completely unresolved. It was always about that moment at the beginning of the first movie, where he sees his parents getting killed. It was basically arrested development. The Ben character is more middle-aged; he seems to be grumpy as hell, but I didn’t feel the pain that I felt in Christian’s performance. And it was that pain that made me interested.”
Meanwhile, Zimmer also seemed to backtrack on his superhero retirement, stating that he’d be open to another score, should the right script come along:
“Ron Howard actually said something very smart to me. He said, “Don’t say you will never do a superhero movie again, wait for somebody to turn up with an amazing script for a superhero movie.” And I suppose that’s what I’m saying: Can I please have the amazing script?”
Originally published March 17, 2017. Updated April 16, 2018.
