Michael Giacchino Takes Over Scoring Duties For ROGUE ONE: A STAR WARS STORY
There's a disturbance in The Force.
Composer Alexandre Desplat, who won an Oscar for the music for Wes Anderson's The Grand Budapest Hotel, was originally slated to create the score for Gareth Edwards' Rogue One: A Star Wars Story. This was a momentous announcement, considering no one aside from John Williams has ever composed music for a live-action theatrical Star Wars movie. But now that job is going to someone else.
THR reports that Michael Giacchino, the Oscar-winning composer of The Incredibles, Up, Star Trek, Lost, and more, has now come on board to score the film, just three months before its release. Apparently the well-publicized reshoots for Rogue One "altered the scoring calendar," and Desplat is no longer available, so Giacchino stepped in. Both are great composers, so I don't think this is necessarily an upgrade or a downgrade — more of a lateral move that will hopefully result in some awesome new music for the new film.
I've always considered Giacchino to be the natural follow-up choice for the Star Wars universe when Williams either passes away or steps down from composing, so I imagined Giacchino only handling the main saga movies, not the spin-offs. I liked the idea of getting someone other than Williams in to do the standalone films just to add another layer of separation between them and the saga films, so I wonder if Giacchino will ultimately end up scoring both types of these franchise movies, or if he'll stick to the standalones in the future.
Giacchino has Doctor Strange coming up in November, but I'll be seeing him perform music from Lost (which I consider to be the best work of his career thus far) at a Lost Live concert later this month, so stay tuned to GeekTyrant for a write-up about that. Rogue One: A Star Wars Story hits theaters on December 16, 2016.