When the original Superman comic series was adapted for television in the early 1940s, what audiences most associated with the Man of Steel was a string of phrases: “Look up at the sky! It’s a bird, it’s a plane!” Originally inspired by Popeye the Sailor Man, our hero from Krypton had superhuman strength and the power of flight lurking beneath his quiet disguise as journalist Clark Kent. But from the start, there was a signature musical theme that helped bring writer Jerry Siegel and artist Joe Shuster’s comic strip to life on the small screen. Superman, the world’s first TV superhero, burst through in full color with the backing of a mighty brass cavalcade—an intro by Betty Boop and Popeye composer Sammy Timberg dubbed the “Superman March.”
Every Superman theme—from the harp-and-brass-driven opener for the 1950s TV show to John Williams’ classical horn succession in 1978’s Superman: The Movie—has in some way reflected the hero’s pursuit of truth and justice. But in recent years, across film and television, there’s been a much messier group of superheroes to root for and an influx of tortured antiheroes who confirm that as a protagonist, Superman is quite boring.
“Where we’ve arrived with writing superhero themes is representative of a more human character, less about being super, and more about someone who arrives at being a hero,” says The Suicide Squad composer John Murphy. “Now, you have all these characters that aren’t necessarily noble. They’re not like Superman or Wonder Woman. They’re not that pure.”
As audiences have acquired an affinity for these imperfect heroes, and with the expansion of superhero titles on streaming platforms, it’s created a space for less conventional soundscapes. The Batman movie theme, composed by Michael Giacchino, is as eerily imposing as the emo crusader revived by Robert Pattinson and otherwise soundtracked by Nirvana. Composer Jon Ekstrand built the theme for Morbius, a biochemist-turned-vampire played by Jared Leto, around a haze of horror strings, creating what he calls a “monster score, but with a superhero undertone.” Later this year, we’ll see Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson as DC Comics’ god-like antihero Black Adam. And on TV, there’s an onslaught of Marvel titles like Loki, with its seductively debaucherous, operatic intro and score by Natalie Holt, and the identity-crisis vehicle Moon Knight, composed by Hesham Nazih. HBO Max’s Peacemaker, starring John Cena as a disruptive killer and Suicide Squad defector, wins bonus points for its delightful musical opening credits, performed to Wig Wam’s “Do Ya Wanna Taste It?”
The most memorable superhero themes create a marquee sound that functions as both a trademark and Pavlovian response for viewers: Hans Zimmer’s gnashing Wonder Woman chords, Alan Silvestri’s rallying-cry symphony for Avengers.
Composer Danny Elfman has been scoring superhero films since 1989’s Batman and 1992’s Batman Returns, later helming an array of Marvel titles and Justice League. “In a good superhero score, you come away with very clear musical identities,” Elfman says. “In a drama, you may give a theme for a character, but it’s not going to follow a specific person around in the same way. In the superhero genre, you’re following the individual rather than just the mood.”
There’s still a signature sound to heroism centered around brass and marching drums, but antiheroes inevitably freshen the landscape, enabling composers to paint shades of deficiency in their leads. For the latest Marvel installment, Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, Elfman gave the score a retro horror feel to match director Sam Raimi’s gruesome rendering. “The protagonist in Doctor Strange is a character we know and kind of love and is on the wrong path, but it was important for this protagonist’s theme to be really heartbreaking and full of sympathy,” Elfman says. “So it’s absolutely not a Darth Vader-esque villain type of thing. It’s the other way around. The fun part of the score was writing something very tender but dark at the same time.”
As any composer or observant fan will tell you, the brass section is a traditional mark of superhero themes. In the late-’70s, Warner Bros. hired John Williams to score Superman based on his music for Jaws and Star Wars, films that steered Hollywood into a new era of classical scores suited equally for movie theaters as concert halls. Performed by the London Symphony Orchestra, Williams’ Oscar-nominated “Superman March” set a precedent and remains the standard for a genre that’s consistently focused on grandeur. “Few movies let you go as big as you can in a superhero movie. It can be this wall of sound,” says Morbius composer Jon Ekstrand.
The best of these themes blend intuition with rule-breaking while cleaving to German composer Richard Wagner’s innovative leitmotif, a signature progression of musical notes that defined a character in an opera and works particularly well for superhero scores, where the music should fit the protagonists and antagonists like a costume. As Murphy puts it, “Wagner wrote the first superhero theme.”
Musicologists might date it back even further. “If you go back to how instruments were used by early man, they used to make noises with pieces of cow horn. They’d blow into them to call out to cattle,” Loki composer Natalie Holt explains. “Soldiers would march, and they’d blow out to a kind of fanfare to signal the start of a fight. We’ve been using brass instruments to call people to battle for centuries before we had films, so brass instruments have this ancient place in our psyche, whereas we’ve used string instruments to tell a story. Strings have been more intimate and emotion-leading. It’s these really ancient associations that we can’t quite fathom, but they seem to hit the right note when we use them in context.”
Elfman’s 1989 Batman theme, a moody detonation of strings and bass, is a classic example of remixing custom. “He took the idea of instruments that would march, but then he used them in a way that was not technically a march,” Murphy says. “Most of the purer versions of superhero themes had a military sort of purposefulness. Danny Elfman kept that, but he made it more urgent and aggressive. He used the noble French horns, but it was more about the big, dark brooding trombones.”
A wave of scores paved the way for further experimentation in the past decade. For The Dark Knight series of the 2000s, Hans Zimmer said he and fellow composer James Newton Howard actively avoided crafting a “happy superhero tune” and emerged instead with a classical-driven punk score that grows even more haunting by the third installment. Their Batman motif was designed to sound disturbing, reflecting the vigilante’s perpetual state of trauma from witnessing his parents’ murder.
Fans and musicians alike notice the composers creating unexpected soundtracks, made possible because the characters themselves aren’t nearly as clean-cut as the man from Smallville. Just as Joaquin Phoenix gave the classic Batman villain a newly unsettling makeover in 2019’s Joker, there’s something as refreshingly nefarious and heartbreaking in the accompanying arrangement. Hildur Guðnadóttir’s celebrated theme opts for sensitive, overcast strings that give the Joker’s interior gloom a shot of empathy. Though the Joker clearly isn’t a hero, it’s fitting that the character exists in a universe where the lines between good and corrupt are blissfully nebulous.
“That’s the kind of thing that gives me hope,” Elfman says. “The music for Joker was inventive, way outside normal boundaries. It’s very complex and deep. Many scores feel like a pop song to me: It’s clearly stating what it is, but it’s not giving me those two or three or four extra layers of depth that I’m yearning for.”
Superhero titles have had a place on television since Superman, Captain America, and Batman mania sparked spoofs like Mr. Terrific and Captain Nice in the 1960s. Some of those early superhero TV scores—like the blustery intro for the late-’70s Wonder Woman series starring Lynda Carter—sound much more Vaudevillian next to today’s sweeping overtures that feel like the weight of the world. Across the board, the streaming playground is littered with big-name superhero film directors, stars, and composers who inevitably bring the same epic scale of their blockbusters to the small screen.
“If you’d asked me a decade ago, I would have said this music will always be more straight-ahead, predictable, generic,” Elfman says. “But the whole concept of television and streaming has been changing radically and allowing a lot more unpredictable and interesting music into what you’re hearing.” He cites the kaleidoscopic score of the Marvel series Legion, composed by Jeff Russo. “It’s like suddenly you’re hearing more inventive stuff on your television than you’re even likely to hear in the theater.”
Marvel’s Loki sees the misunderstood king of mischief from the Thor franchise in an existential struggle to curb his destructive habits. The idea was for the score to skew more peculiar than a typical Marvel theme that rides on pure adrenaline. “When I was creating my theme for Loki, I wanted people to feel the flourish and flair and a sense of drama, like he’s not exactly a hero,” Holt says. “Loki’s a bit of a baddie, so it was important for me to take references from places that weren’t traditional.”
Holt drew from a range of influences like Doctor Who, early electronic composer Delia Derbyshire, and 1960s sci-fi B-movies. Combine that with a touch of Mozart, Scandinavian folk, and prophetic theremin effects, and you get a richly layered theme whose impishness mirrors Loki’s. “The theremin was an instrument that connected us with this sci-fi, slightly wacky look of the show, almost like Clockwork Orange,” Holt says. “I watched Clockwork Orange when I was a teenager, and it blew my mind, that combination of classical music, synths, and then this incredible production design and this incredibly violent story.”
What’s unique about superhero scores is that, unlike with a one-off film or even a trilogy, the music is destined to be remixed over decades as each franchise gets revamped with different directors, actors, and composers, sometimes to the agony of fans who grow attached to certain motifs. “You’re working through the aesthetic of the director,” Elfman says. “Some directors want to push much more outside the box and do something weirder. Some directors want to keep it contained into a world that they recognize very clearly.” But in a field that’s grown increasingly complex, the real heroes exist in the grays.
