While the Marvel Cinematic Universe does a lot of things extremely well—like making money—one of the areas in which there’s room for improvement is original film scores. You’d think with so many superheroes they’d have crafted a number of iconic and memorable themes, but by and large the MCU is devoid of any such thing. The closest they’ve come is with composerAlan Silvestri, the guy behindBack to the FutureandForrest Gump. He made his MCU debut with 2011’sCaptain America: The First Avenger, crafting arguably the franchise’s only memorable superhero theme, and he returned to compose the score for 2012’sThe Avengersto somewhat mixed results. Silvestri did manage something close to a memorableAvengerstheme, but ultimately his work on that film was a bit disappointing.
For theAvengerssequel,Joss Whedonworked with MCU regularBrian Tyler(Iron Man 3,Thor: The Dark World) and then brought inDanny Elfmanto help craft a theme—again to disappointing results. But with the two-partAvengers: Infinity Warsaga, Silvestri is being brought back into the fold to hopefully work some more magic on the biggest Marvel movies yet.
Silvestri made the announcement himself yesterday on his site, and I’m curious to see how he handles so many different characters in these two films, and to see whether Marvel can finally break that score curse.
It’s not like the MCU scores are bad.Henry Jackman’s work onAnt-Manis pretty neat! They just kind of exist—there’s nothing that makes them noteworthy. Which, again, is odd considering how much care Marvel puts into crafting these films in the first place.
Nevertheless, take a trip down memory lane by perusing some prior MCU scores.Avengers: Infinity Warstarts production this December with the films opening in theaters in May 2018 and 2019.
