The season of looking back – and forward – is here again. About a year ago, I wrote an article (published at upcomingfilmscores.com) about the most anticipated scores that were about to see the light of day in 2009 – James Horner’s Avatar was, of course, the number one on the list, and other scores on the list were Michael Giacchino’s Star Trek, Christopher Young’s Creation and Danny Elfman’s Terminator: Salvation. As always, some delivered more than you were expecting, while others were major disappointments. We’re not going to get into which ones belong to the first or second categories – instead, let’s look forward, again to what is in the pipeline for film music fans in the next year to come. MovieScore Magazine producly brings you our top-10 most anticipated film scores of 2010!

1. THE CHRONICLES OF NARNIA: THE VOYAGE OF THE DAWN TREADER (David Arnold)
Release date: December 10. Harry Gregson-Williams’ music for the two first Narnia films is probably his best and the films clearly provided a rich canvas for a truly epic score: astounding sets made room for big and colourful orchestrations, unique characters called for a rich thematic approach, and mindboggling fantasy elements opened the door to some unusual sounds. It is, for continuity’s sake, a pity that Gregson-Williams won’t be scoring the third film, but having David Arnold onboard as the new composer on the franchise is not bad – on the contrary. He is responsible for some of the most wonderfully bombastic orchestral scores in modern cinema: Stargate, Independence Day and Godzilla, and if you listen to those and realize that Narnia actually is Arnold’s first fantasy movie with all the fresh air such an experience brings to the table, you have all the right to expect big things to come out of this film musically. Arnold has the ability to pen some truly memorable themes, and with Nicholas Dodd’s trademark bold orchestrations and their exciting action scoring style, the third Narnia will most likely become the epic of the year.

2. ALICE IN WONDERLAND (Danny Elfman)
Release date: March 5. Any new Tim Burton/Danny Elfman movie is a major film music event. This is, amazingly, their twelfth feature together and whether or not Alice in Wonderland will become a soundtrack classic such as Edward Scissorhands, Batman or Nightmare Before Christmas or a critic favourite like Sleepy Hollow or The Corpse Bride remains to be seen. The imaginative gallery of unique characters, and the dark fairytale nature of the film, definitely fit Elfman more than anything else. Also, for most of Burton’s films, the composer actually comes up with some of his most ambitious melodic and thematic writing (in contrast to his more motif-orientated action and thriller scores for other directors). Given the nature of Lewis Carroll’s story there should plenty of room for Elfman to come up with some striking themes in addition to what is probably going to be what we expect and what we all love: that dark, quirky, slightly gothic Burton/Elfman sound that brought the composer to film music stardom.

3. CENTURION (Ilan Eshkeri)
Release date: August 27. Up and coming composer Ilan Eshkeri has several exciting films coming up, including Julian Fellowes’ From Time to Time, but Neil Marshall’s Centurion - a big Roman epic about a grup of soldiers who fight for their lives behind enemy lines – could very well be his finest opportunity yet to pen a modern classic in the film music literature. Eshkeri, who started out in the business working for Ed Shearmur and the late Michael Kamen, belongs to the most exciting of the new generation of film composers, a versatile musician who delivers his best work when allowed to write for big orchestra (among his finest scores are last year’s The Young Victoria, the wonderfully old-school Stardust and the much underrated score for Hannibal Rising, co-written by Shigeru Umebayashi). Eshkeri’s score has already been recorded at Abbey Road by the London Metropolitan Orchestra, and it features a number of celtic solo instruments such as the bodhrán, celtic harp and carnyx (an ancient celtic bronze trumpet that produced a mighty sound rarely heard in contemporary music).

4. THE A-TEAM (Alan Silvestri)
Release date: June 11. It was a pleasant surprise to read Alan Silvestri’s announcement on his new web site about the assignment to score Fox’s upcoming feature film version of the classic 1980s tv series A-Team. Silvestri has of course scored a lot of high-profile action films and some of them are of the highest quality (the Back to the Future trilogy, the two Predator scores and Judge Dredd) – but we have been accustomed to witness nearly every big action gig going to Hans Zimmer or any of his previous or current proteges (Powell, Gregson-Williams, Jablonsky…). Silvestri’s score for last year’s G.I. Joe: Rise of the Cobra was perhaps a little uninspired, but Silvestri’s action scoring style is still very solid and when he pumps out a heroic brass melody over a marching ostinato, you hear that it is Silvestri, no one else. Few film composers today have a style of their own – Silvestri definitely does. The big question on this project is perhaps whether or not Silvestri will make use of Mike Post’s and Pete Carpenter’s classic A-Team tv theme – a pretty cool (but dated?) theme that could work very well in the Silvestri action fabric.

5. THE TEMPEST (Elliot Goldenthal)
Release date: N/A. The creative partnership between director Julie Taymor and composer Elliot Goldenthal (also a couple in “real” life) has been a very fruitful one with several off-beat stage productions as well as three feature films. All of them have a unique quality: Titus featured one of Goldenthal’s most ambitious scores, a huge orchestral and choral work that later, under strange circumstances, found its way into a another (much more popular) film, 300, while Frida was accompanied by a much more intimate, latin-flavoured score that landed Goldenthal his only Oscar (so far). Across the Universe gave Goldenthal the opportunity to act more as a musical director, making sure that Taymor’s ingenious line-up of Beatles songs worked as a whole musically. It would, of course, be fantastic if Goldenthal returns to Titus territory for The Tempest (a possibility as both are Shakespeare dramas), but so far the concept seems to be revolving around Shakespeare’s own songs. In a Variety interview, the composer stated that he wanted to avoid the usual Elizabethan sound in these songs. “It has to sound like something you’ve never heard or can categorize. I have to compose around the Shakespeare meter.” In another interview, with Billboard, the composer quite beautifully described the scoring of The Tempest as a very careful process: “With Shakespeare, you have to dance between the raindrops of his language, because that’s music in itself.”

6. THE TREE OF LIFE (Alexandre Desplat)
Release date: N/A. French composer Alexandre Desplat is probably the fastest rising film scoring star in Hollywood in recent years, with a number of exquisit musical contributions to acclaimed films such as The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, The Queen and Lust, Caution. Desplat is the type of composer who attracts the interest of seemingly all the auteurs in the world – he has worked with such great directors as Ang Lee, David Fincher, Stephen Frears, Wes Anderson and Robert Guédiguian – and some of the finest directors of our time stand in line to work with him: Roman Polanski on The Ghost and Terrence Malick on The Tree of Life. Malick is a very personal filmmaker and you can never predict what will be the outcome of his ambitious projects, but the pairing of him and Desplat should undoubtedly result in a score of great interest. Desplat has described the film as a “deep story of love” and the composer has always done his most beautiful and intriguing work for films in that veign. According to Variety, the composer has already recorded at least an hour of music for the film as the director wants to edit the film to the music – a rare luxury for a film composer whose biggest challenge sometimes is to compete with existing music from other films on a temp track.

7. THE LAST AIRBENDER (James Newton Howard)
Release date: July 2. The collaboration between director M. Night Shyamalan and composer James Newton Howard is a prolific one and virtually all of the scores from their films have been of the highest quality and definitely among the composer’s best. The Last Airbender is their seventh film together, and after Howard’s dark and elegant music for Signs, Unbreakable and The Happening, this science fiction epic is probably going to be the most dramatic and large-scale Shyamalan/Howard score so far. The composer has already scored the theatrical teaser trailer for the film, and if that is representative of what is to come in the film itself, we can expect a huge orchestra, ethnic percussion and woodwinds and action music typical of its composer (the trailer features a pounding ostinato in 5/4 meter, a Howard trademark ever since The Fugitive and Outbreak). Based on the comic “Avatar: The Last Airbender” (not related to James Cameron’s current blockbuster), the film tells the story about four nations – Air, Water, Earth and Fire – and the only surviving Avatar with the power to manipulate all four elements.

8. IRON MAN 2 (John Debney)
Release date: May 7. When Ramin Djawadi and not John Debney was assigned to score the first Iron Man movie, the result did not fare well with the soundtrack community. The score featured a lot of Zimmer-ish rhythm-driven action scoring, electric guitars and an orchestra that played somewhere in the background. The director of the film, Jon Favreau, had been working with Debney on his two previous films (Elf and Zathura) and lots of fans were expecting Debney to get the opportunity to write one of those rousing orchestral scores he do so well for Iron Man. That did not happen – but here is another chance, and one wonders if Favreau simply demanded that Debney come back for the sequel. “We jumped right back in as if we’d never stopped working together,” Debney commented in a Variety article recently. Although Debney’s filmography is dominated by light-weight comedies, what film music fans love him for is the melody-driven orchestral excitement he brings to action films, as witnessed by the popularity of his Cutthroat Island score. Let’s stay tuned and hope for a fresh new Iron Man sound complete with a great heroic main theme!

9. TRON LEGACY (Daft Punk)
Release date: December 17. Unlike the majority of the anticipated scores on this list, the music for Disney’s new Tron movie is not going to be orchestral. An orchestral score for a Tron movie would probably be as appropriate as a Tangerine Dream score in a fantasy fairy-tale such as, let’s say, Legend (okay, we need to get over that now, it’s been 25 years). Anyone who has been a fan of electronica in the past decade or a little more is familiar with French duo Daft Punk (consisting of Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo) and Disney’s signing of them to score Tron Legacy was a major surprise and surely one of the studio’s most inspired musical decisions lately. The original 1982 movie was scored by electronic music pioneer Wendy Carlos, and while Daft Punk aren’t legendary in the same way, their distinct musical style should lend itself very well to movie scoring (if you are looking for an electronica score, of course). Incidentally, many of their live performances has had a sort of very Tron-inspired visual look, so it looks like match made in heaven. What will come out of it musically remains to be seen of course, and whether or not Daft Punk are scoring to picture in the traditional way or are contributing a large number of “songs” that will be applied to the movie filtered through the hands of skilled music supervisors and editors is also unclear. Nevertheless, for fans of French house music and film music fans, Tron Legacy is going to be a major event in 2010 and probably one of those love-or-hate scores!

10. EDGE OF DARKNESS (Howard Shore)
Release date: January 29. The rejection of John Corigliano’s score for this film was the biggest disappointment in film music last year, but I wonder if they could have found a better replacement composer. Without knowing exactly how director Martin Campbell is treating and remaking the original 1980s tv series, it does look like a perfect film for a dark, brooding and elegant Howard Shore score. And yes, you are allowed to have a smart-ass smile on your face if you suggest that Shore may re-use some of the intense music he wrote for another somewhat similarly themed Mel Gibson film, Ransom, that never found its way into that movie as it was rejected and replaced by James Horner. All sarcam aside, Shore is a fantastic composer when it comes to this type of material and few can get under the skin of the viewer/listener as he does (just pick any David Cronenberg film for proof). So will the score mirror Michael Kamen’s and Eric Clapton’s television score from the 1985 BBC series? Probably not, but if it did in some way that would be rather neat, wouldn’t it?

… AND ANOTHER 30 WORTH KEEPING AN EYE (AND EAR) ON:

• Battle: Los Angeles (Brian Tyler)
• Black Death (Christian Henson)
• The Bounty Hunter (George Fenton)
• Clash of the Titans (Craig Armstrong)
• Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark (Marco Beltrami)
• Escape from Planet Earth (Joby Talbot)
• The Expendables (Brian Tyler)
• The Ghost (Alexandre Desplat)
• Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (N/A)
• The Hole (Javier Navarrete)
• How To Train Your Dragon (John Powell)
• Inception (Hans Zimmer)
• In My Sleep (Conrad Pope)
• London Boulevard (Howard Shore)
• The Mighty Macs (William Ross)
• Percy Jackson and the Olympians: The Lightning Thief (Christophe Beck)
• Piranha 3-D (Michael Wandmacher)
• Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time (Harry Gregson-Williams)
• Quantum Quest: A Cassini Space Odyssey (Shawn K. Clement)
• Rapunzel (Alan Menken)
• Red Dawn (Brian Tyler)
• Repo Men (Marco Beltrami)
• The Revenge (Johan Söderqvist)
• Robin Hood (Marc Streitenfeld)
• The Rum Diary (Christopher Young)
• Salt (James Newton Howard)
• Season of the Witch (Atli Örvarsson)
• The Shrine (Ryan Shore)
• Straw Dogs (Larry Groupé)
• Toy Story 3 (Randy Newman)

Mikael Carlsson