Philip Glass Score To Signal Darker Direction for Fantastic Four

Possibly in an attempt to distance themselves even further from the underperforming Fantastic Four movies previously released from 20^th Century Fox, the studio has hired on minimalist composer, Philip Glass, along with Marco Beltrami, to compose the score for their upcoming reboot of the Marvel franchise.

While Glass is no stranger to scoring for both the big screen and television, his works have historically been more in the realm of independent films and documentaries. Glass had also rescored the 1931 Universal Classic, Dracula, and hired the Kronos Quartet to play his haunting music. With all of that this appears to be his first big foray into the big budget, blockbuster movie arena.

However, the presence of composer Beltrami might also be there to make the overall score more “accessible” to movie watchers with such composition credits as World War Z, Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines, and even I, Robot under his belt.

And unlike other trailers for potentially huge movies that have been released by other studios, 20^th Century opted not to go down the road of reusing older, more familiar music in an attempt to grab at audience’s attention, and instead had Glass compose music for the latest Fantastic Four trailer (whether or not that music ends up being used in the movie is uncertain).

Director Josh Trank said in an interview with Collider, that he managed to convince Glass to be a part of this project largely due to the philosophical nature of his previous film, Chronicle.

“Philip Glass is one of my heroes. Whenever I’m writing or drawing I always put on Philip Glass. This is my first time making a movie with a score and I thought, ‘why not give it a shot?’

“The first words out of his mouth were, ‘I just saw your movie [2012’s Chronicle] and it’s very philosophical.’ We were talking about the philosophy of Chronicle and it gave me goosebumps. We invited him out to set [of Fantastic Four] and he came to set for like three days and had a great time. He was blown away by the scale of the film. I’ve been working with him for almost a year now and he’s so inspiring. He’s such a humble, amazing guy.”

Tronk has also stated that he has admired the “cinematic vision” that director David Cronenberg has, and that served as his inspiration in approaching his reimagining of this franchise. That, along with the hiring of Glass as co-composer clearly suggests this could be the very tone that 20^th Century is hoping for given the enormous success Warner Brothers had in hiring Christopher Nolan for rebooting Batman.