Shazam Director Reveals Why He Used John Williams’ Superman Theme

Shazam!’s director has revealed why he opted to use John Williams’ Superman score in the film. [...]

By Aaron Perine

Shazam!'s director has revealed why he opted to use John Williams' Superman score in the film. That final scene with the Man of Steel was a winner for a lot of DC Comics fans. However, some of them couldn't help but note the sort of dissonance between the Henry Cavill version of the character and the classic Superman theme. David F. Sandberg took to Twitter to explain the choice, and his reasoning is pretty simple when you think about it. The Hans Zimmer score is stirring and emotional too, but fans might not be able to guess it immediately like Williams' popular work. Communicating that heroic feeling effortlessly and quickly will get it through to the audience faster. No ill-will towards Zimmer's work on Man of Steel at all.

"It's a great theme that pumps you up but my thinking was it's not as recognizable for as many people as Williams. Especially when you just play so few notes of it. If it had been a proper scene with Superman showing up to fight it would have been kick ass with Zimmer," he wrote on Twitter. "To be honest, when I made my long neck joke video and used the Zimmer theme I did really like the feeling it gave but we would have had to have Cavill to really make it work."

As far as Shazam!, the star of the first picture, Zachary Levi talked about how the fan response to the film has really stood out to him. He explained how much the aggregator reception meant in an interview after the film released.

"Are there flaws in it? Are there other ways it could have been better polished or whatever? Sure," Levi began. "Most movies have bits and pieces about them that don't, unfortunately, get fully cooked or fully polished based on the pipeline of making movies and all that. But all in all, we made a really good movie, a solid movie that still remained in the 90 percentile on Rotten Tomatoes and still made so many people really happy and brought people a lot of joy, and that was awesome. So if we can just do at least that, I'm gonna be stoked. And if we can do more than that, that's what I'm hoping. I want to bring all that same joy and polish and fix and do whatever we can to the other structures of things that can make that tighter."

Do you think we'll see Superman in Shazam! 2? Let us know down in the comments!

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