The nearly unrelenting moodiness of Batman V Superman: Dawn Of Justice didn’t just bum out audiences; it wore on Hans Zimmer, who was tasked with scoring the film. Zimmer of course wrote the music for the Dark Knight trilogy that starred Christian Bale, who proved to be a great muse for the legendary composer. So he was asked to resume his duties for Zack Snyder’s Man Of Steel-quel, a gig that turned out to be a real drag for him. When it came time to write music to accompany Ben Affleck’s performance in Snyder’s film, Zimmer tells Inverse he was at a loss.
I spent months trying to come up with something for Ben. 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.
Bale’s Batman was just Zimmer’s Batman, it seems, which left Zimmer feeling like he was “betraying everything Christian had done. So there’s a certain amount of loyalty attached to those [Christopher Nolan] movies, as well.” The composer did get some help from Junkie XL, who seems to have played a vital role in completing the score.
As for why he found Batfleck so uninspiring or confounding, Zimmer says that version of the Dark Knight was “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.” Lots of critics found Affleck’s performance to be the film’s only redeeming quality, aside from its introduction of Gal Gadot’s Wonder Woman, so it’s interesting that it left Zimmer so cold. But the composer did effectively retire from scoring superhero films, so maybe he’s just over the genre.