Back in the waning days of 2010, there was a rumor that said Hans Zimmer had been selected to score the upcoming Superman reboot, Man of Steel. At the time the fit seemed obvious: Christopher Nolan is serving as a producer on the upcoming blockbuster and he has worked with Zimmer on all of his films since Batman Begins in 2005. The whole story was shut down a few days later when someone from the press spoke to Zimmer who said that he was not attached and that he hadn't even met with director Zack Snyder about the film. Of course, just because Zimmer wasn't attached to the project then doesn't mean he wasn't ever going to be attached, and that was proven today.
Variety reports that Zimmer has been hired to write the music for Man of Steel. The reboot, which stars Henry Cavill as the Man of Tomorrow, takes us back to the character's origin and his first battle with Zod (Michael Shannon). Zimmer did all of the music for Nolan's Batman trilogy, including The Dark Knight Rises - which comes out next month. Most recently he composed the score for Madagascar 3: Europe's Most Wanted, which has won the box office for the last two weeks in a row. This will be the first time that Snyder hasn't used Tyler Bates as the composer for one of his movies.
As if it weren't hard enough to create a score for a character so important to pop culture as Superman, Zimmer has his work cut out for him thanks to the work of John Williams. While Zimmer has certainly shown over the years that he is more than capable of crafting an iconic score, Williams' work on 1978's Superman was the stuff of legend and is immediately recognizable to anyone on this planet. It will be fascinating to see what Zimmer comes up with.
