You Can Stream Danny Elfman’s ‘Justice League’ Score Right Now

Justice League isn’t hitting cinemas until next week, but in keeping with how the movie has been marketing itself by releasing as much of it to the public as possible, Danny Elfman’s entire score is now stream-able online.

No Danny Elfman score is going to be bad, but Justice League’s is remarkably good, especially considering how many characters and already established musical themes he had to work with when creating it. Elfman recently spoke with DC Comics (via Superman Homepage) about the distinct challenges that came with Justice League, and how he worked around providing too many characters with their own music.

The bigger challenge in Justice League was that I had all of these characters and I couldn’t just go and start writing big themes for everybody because you can only do so many themes in one movie. How to fit that puzzle together was really the tricky part.

I came up with two heroic themes, one which was just an overall Justice League theme and one which was a team theme. I’m using that more when the team is coming together. I also have an “Anti-Hero Theme” as well as a Steppenwolf theme. But then I tried to provide really simple little hooks for Cyborg, Flash and Aquaman, without going too far. There’s a certain point where you just get a mess of themes, and that’s just going to be a nightmare. So, I tried to simplify those characters to just a few notes, so that there’s something recognizable, and I tried to keep my new thematic action more involved around the entire group as a whole, so it didn’t get too fragmented. But it was still quite a huge jigsaw puzzle of how to do that in a way that wasn’t too messy and served the purposed of the film. So yeah, Justice League was really a challenging film, but I like challenges.

I don’t consider myself a music critic, but a lot of Elfman’s score brings me back to more classic superhero movies of the past — there are definitely hints of his Batman and, yes, Superman’s classic theme finds its way in there too. There’s a lot of it — 27 tracks, many of which are 4 minutes or longer — that so much of the more bombastic parts start to sound the same, and at times it’s in danger of straying into too-many-notes territory. That said, it’s an entertaining and exciting bunch of music from a true veteran of the craft. Let’s just hope that Justice League lives up to it.

Listen to the whole score (and The White Stripes’ “Icky Thump”) right here. Justice League hits theaters November 17.

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