Hans Zimmer composes music for movies like 'The Lion King' and the 'Dark Knight' trilogy. There's 1 film he scored that he didn't think 'would be a blockbuster.'

Something magical happens when a Hans Zimmer score kicks in. From the emotional themes of The Lion King, Inception and Gladiator to the pulse-pounding sounds of Pirates of the Caribbean, Interstellar and the Dark Knight trilogy, Zimmer’s compositions don’t just accompany a story — they define it.

But despite having scored more than 500 projects, the two-time Oscar winner said he’s used to being doubted.

“Everybody comes to you and says, ‘We want something new,’ so you do something new, and they go, ‘Oh, I’m not sure. It’s a bit too new,’” he told Yahoo Entertainment. “There’s this fear of the new, but it’s my job to be courageous and try to do something different.”

That tension, between expectation and surprise, is where Zimmer said he thrives. It’s also what connects his music to generations of moviegoers.

“People tell me, ‘You must keep the pieces of music short, because the youth has no attention span.’ Complete rubbish. The youth watches long-form television,” he said, noting that the full theme for Pirates of the Caribbean was 14 minutes long, while the one for The Dark Knight was 22 minutes long.

This fall, Zimmer’s music takes center stage once again with “The World of Hans Zimmer: A New Dimension,” a 24-city North American tour kicking off Sept. 5 in Sunrise, Fla., with tickets going on sale May 2. Led by longtime collaborator and conductor Matt Dunkley, the new production brings Zimmer’s scores to life with a full symphony and immersive video design.

Matt Dunkley conducts. (Frank Embacher)

For the maestro, it’s an opportunity to connect with people on a deeper level.

“We can write music and have it performed by 100 people, and they channel their emotions in a way that it translates over into the audience,” he said of the touring experience. “And then we all become one. I think that’s pretty amazing.”

The art of writing for a summer blockbuster

Despite having composed the scores for some of the biggest blockbusters of the last few decades, Zimmer’s process begins in a surprisingly simple way.

“I’ll tell you where it starts,” he explained. “By going out for dinner with the director, opening a good bottle of wine and saying to him, ‘Tell me the story.’ He won’t recite the script. He’ll tell you the story, and he’ll tell you the bits which are important to him.”

From there, the music starts to take shape. “We start talking about the music and we start talking about the tone. We start talking about the colors.”

It’s an instinctive approach, Zimmer explained, that deliberately ignores trends and marketing buzzwords.

“I don’t ever think, ‘Is it a summer blockbuster?’ I do films because I love films,” he said. “I worked on one of the Mission: Impossible films, and there was a billboard outside my studio that said: ‘May whatever [date].’ I kept looking at this and going, ‘I’m not going to be ready by May!’”

Some of his biggest projects came with low expectations — or none at all.

“Gladiator had an enormous amount of problems, but it was a delight for me to work on. I didn’t think it would be a blockbuster,” he said of the 2000 film, which grossed over $465 million worldwide.

“And The Lion King? I was told by Disney, ‘If you guys make $80 million worldwide, we’ll be happy,’” Zimmer explained. “I told them I don’t like musicals, and they went, ‘We guarantee you it’ll never be a musical.’”

Not only was The Lion King a box-office hit, earning Zimmer his first Academy Award for Best Original Score, but it also became one of the highest-grossing Broadway musicals of all time.

“The important thing is to be the smart guy who’s constantly wrong in the right way,” he said in hindsight.

Zimmer and The Dark Knight co-composer James Newton Howard sign movie posters at Virgin Megastore in Hollywood in 2008. (Barry King/WireImage)

Zimmer enjoys delivering the unexpected. When scoring Sherlock Holmes in 2009, for example, he leaned into the chaos of Victorian London and filled the soundtrack with banjo and fiddle — much to the studio’s concern.

“The studio was horrified,” he recalled. “It wasn’t what they expected, but then people loved it because it was quirky, it was fun. Plus, I could defend my choices.”

He brought a similarly disruptive spirit to Dune (2021), which earned him his second Academy Award, and to its sequel, Dune: Part Two (2024).

“We’re on a different planet, tens of thousands of years in the future,” he explained. “I didn’t believe that old music would be appropriate, so it should be new music and new instruments,” such as synthesizers, an Armenian duduk and a cello played like a Tibetan horn.

Even as he innovates sonically, Zimmer continues to champion one of film’s oldest traditions: the orchestra.

“You can say a lot of bad things about the film industry, and they’re all true, but it’s the only place on Earth that still commissions orchestral music on a daily basis,” he said. “And if the orchestras go, we lose a huge chunk of what makes us human, the human achievement that we can even do that.”

Requiem for humanity

For Zimmer, every score is part of a much bigger story. Looking back at his body of work, he said he doesn’t just see spectacle. He sees struggle.

“There is a requiem to the whole of humanity,” he said of his music. “My requiem is to the brutality of life.”

It’s one of the reasons why he often thinks about the paradox of his career as a German composer who’s spent decades helping America reflect on itself.

“I’m this German guy who keeps writing about America,” he said. “One of the things I try to do is get America to look at America again, sometimes in wonder and sometimes in horror.”

Over the decades, he’s made contradictions a major part of the creative process. After all, “those are the things that make life colorful,” he said.

As for what’s next? Beyond curating the upcoming tour, Zimmer is still chasing new sounds, new stories and maybe something even bigger.

“The beat must go on,” he said of the future. “To tell you the truth, I just want the world to turn into one f***ing giant disco.”