Nicholas Hoult plays the perfect megalomaniac, Lex Luthor, in James Gunn’s “Superman.”
As Superman’s arch-nemesis, the powerful owner of LutherCorp, he can’t stand that people look up to the Man of Steel and not him. With billions of dollars at his disposal and tech masterminds at his service, Luthor sets out to banish Superman from Earth forever.
For co-composer John Murphy, Luthor’s theme was one of the first he wrote. “James will send me the script and I’ll start writing main themes for the movie, and he’ll use those demos to shoot the movie too,” Murphy explains. It’s how the pair have collaborated ever since “Suicide Squad” and “Guardians of the Galaxy 3.” This time around, Gunn wanted to nail Luthor early in the process.
“There are actually two themes. There’s the main theme, which is established when Ultraman (Tom Welling) flies back to the LutherCorp headquarters,” Murphy explains. “It was an opportunity to go big there, and it reprises when Angela Spica/The Engineer locks into the Kryptonian computer.”
Murphy worked with fellow composer David Fleming, who took what had been established and built on the themes for the action sequences.
The second Luthor theme can be heard as things start to unravel in the third act of the film, as new reports come out about his true motives, and financial corruptions – he’s been funding a war and profiteering by working with the President of the fictional country of Boravia as they prepare to invade their poorer neighbor called Jarhanpur. “That has a more tragic element to it,” Murphy says, likening the character to something out of Shakespeare. On one hand, Luthor has some humanity in him. “He gets angry with his girlfriend, he gets jealous and then you see this switch to something where he’s being his most narcissistic and megalomaniac.”
With Luthor’s overbearing demeanor, Murphy admits he wrote at least six versions of the theme, wanting to get it right. “It felt natural to keep it in that pure, grandiose orchestral space. Where we really needed to just blow that up a little was when we brought the choir in, and we gave it a sense of grandiosity.” He continues, “It’s almost you establish the sensibility more than the instruments. You establish the language of the melody, and you establish the feeling that you want to evoke. The orchestra does one of the most perfect things, you know, within the whole world of making a movie.”
Fleming calls Hoult “the secret weapon of this film.” “He’s not just obsessed with doom, he’s driven by envy, and he’s driven by human qualities and in his way is vulnerable.”
To reflect all of that, guitars, drums and synths also drive his motif at certain points.
Fleming largely worked on the back half of the film and the action sequences. He too jumped on using grand orchestral sounds. “When the pocket universe comes, you see it and feel it musically splitting the city apart.” By the end of the film, Fleming manages to thread everything back to Luthor’s theme.
The composers also had to navigate the IP’s legacy, in particular, that of John Williams’ original heroic themes – the very DNA of Superman. Murphy had put together an electric guitar arrangement of the theme which was used at a pivotal moment. “It was so clearly being embraced.”
Aside from the fanfare and opening call, Fleming noticed there was a thread of Clark Kent learning about his purpose on Earth, and a message from his Kryptonian parents eventually reveals his mission. “When that comes into question, this thread hadn’t yet been explored. The part of the John Williams theme that’s always touched me the most is the back cadence; there’s this beautiful major seventh jump.” Fleming continues, “I remember meeting with James, and I started playing with that part, and slowing it down, and making it this emotional cord build, but approaching it differently, with a choir.” Fleming found a fresh way of embedding It. He says, “We were unearthing something that already existed, but finding a fresh way to do it, and it ended up becoming the crucial piece of DNA for Superman and the throughline of the film.”
Listen to the score below.