5 Movie Scores That Got Torn Up And Rewritten At The Last Possible Second

Justice League Swapped Composers With Almost No Warning — And Danny Elfman Had One Day To Decide

Junkie XL had already written individual hero themes for Justice League before Joss Whedon took over post-production from Zack Snyder and brought in his own go-to composer instead. Danny Elfman said the call came so fast there was barely time to think it over before he was already writing music.

Rogue One's Composer Had Just One Month To Write An Entire Star Wars Score

Alexandre Desplat was originally set to score Rogue One, but summer reshoots blew up the scoring schedule and he had to bow out. Michael Giacchino stepped in with roughly four and a half weeks to deliver a nearly all-original score, deliberately avoiding Desplat's unused material so he could start completely fresh.

Solo Almost Had No John Williams Music At All — Then He Wrote One Theme Anyway

For the first time since 1977, a live-action Star Wars movie wasn't fully scored by John Williams — that job went to John Powell instead. But Williams couldn't stay away entirely, composing a brand new theme for young Han that Powell then wove through his own score for the rest of the film.

World War Z's Score Was So Intense The Studio Made The Composer Tone It Down Before Release

Marco Beltrami built his original World War Z score around emergency-siren tones and the sound of animal skulls being crushed together, but production delays and a completely reshot third act pulled him off the project for a year. When he returned, he had to pull back his own "harsh, dissonant" music because studio executives worried it would push the PG-13 film toward an R rating.

James Gunn's Superman Quietly Brought In A Second Composer Just Weeks Before It Hit Theaters

John Murphy had been writing Superman's music since before cameras even rolled, but after test screenings pushed Gunn to trim humor and rework the film's tone, a second composer, David Fleming, was added to the score late enough that his involvement wasn't publicly confirmed until just months before release. Some reports even suggested Fleming had as little as a week to write and record his portion of the music.