When looking over The Newton Brothers’ body of work, these are two have composed a lot of music within the horror genre, including every project Mike Flanagan has made since Oculus (with some of them ranking as the best horror movies of all time). However, currently John Andrew Grush and Taylor Newton Stewart are getting attention for their debut into the superhero genre with X-Men ’97, the revival of X-Men: The Animated Series that’s streaming to Disney+ subscribers. But the brothers aren’t content for that to be their sole contribution to Marvel Studios, as they told CinemaBlend that they’d be game to compose for characters like Doctor Doom and Daredevil, and I’d be down for this to happen.
I had the pleasure of speaking with The Newton Brothers about their work composing music for X-Men ’97, which critics have been raving about. and as our conversation was wrapping up, I asked them if there was a live-action Marvel movie or TV show they’d like to score for, or even just of a character for whom they’d like to create theme music. Taylor responded:
There are so many properties that are so cool. How much time do you have? We could just go on and on. There really is. There are so many iconic characters in the MCU, new ones that haven’t been touched. And I always loved the more intricate [characters]. That’s what’s great about Magneto and these sort of darker characters that have multiple sides. I think Doctor Doom would be so much fun to play with, it’d be an arming character. There’s Blade, there’s obviously X-Men, which Andy and I are clearly huge fans of. Daredevil, I love Daredevil. There are so many different characters that would be incredible to play with, because for me, what always fascinates me is not so much the ‘I’m a superhero and I have all these powers.’ That’s really cool when it happens, but it’s the excitement of the internal struggle of the character, the complexities that they’re fighting to not want to do something or they want to do something or it goes against their principles, which is what I love about X-Men. That’s what’s exciting and that gets me pumped up. We’ve been very spoiled to work with Marvel, they’ve been incredibly supportive, so I hope we get to do more.
I’ll start off by saying even though we’re only four episodes into X-Men ’97, I would absolutely approve of The Newton Brothers scoring the live-action X-Men reboot, which is presumably still on the search for a writer. But if those versions of the mutants are off the table, then Doctor Doom, Daredevil and Blade are all viable options too, if not more so. After all, The Fantastic Four and Blade are both upcoming Marvel movies lined up for 2025, and the upcoming Marvel TV show Daredevil: Born Again is expected to premiere on Disney+ that year as well.
Of the three that Taylor Newton Stewart mentioned, my preference would be for he and John Andrew Grush to tackle The Fantastic Four, not just because they’re interested in creating a theme for Doctor Doom, but also because that superhero team operates on a similarly fantastical level as the X-Men. That being said, thanks to their extensive horror experience, they could surely handle vampire hunter Blade quite well, but I’d also be intrigued to hear how they’d approach a street-level hero like Daredevil. Whatever the case, Kevin Feige and the rest of the Marvel Studios brass, please consider using The Newton Brothers’ musical talents for any of these live-action offerings.
New episodes of X-Men ’97 premiere Wednesdays on Disney+. Keep checking in with us for continuing coverage on the series’ biggest events, and use the 2024 TV schedule to se what other shows are currently running.
