Here's Why Blockbuster Superhero Movies All Sound the Same

The beginning of prolific film essayist Tony Zhou's latest video, The Marvel Symphonic Universe, feels like a roast. After asking strangers on the street to recite the iconic film scores like Star Wars and James Bond, Zhou asks about the music from Marvel films—and gets crickets. But in classic Every Frame a Painting style, he expands on this idea to educate his viewers about how the cinema sausage is made.

In this episode, the true stars of the show are temporary scores, a necessary evil of big-budget filmmaking that legendary composer Danny Elfman calls, "The bane of my existence." Zhou sheds light on how filmmakers often rely on a temporary soundtrack to build the tempo and rhythm of a cut, then ask the composer to simply imitate those cues. When they use scores from other iconic films, the result is that many blockbuster movies, including most of the Marvel Universe, wind up sounding the same.

Zhou points out other elements that lead to Marvel's forgettable sounds, such as the use of narration and tendancy to use music that says the same thing as the visuals. These are not the result of bad filmmaking, he says, but merely safe filmmaking. That safety is part of what has made Marvel the highest-grossing franchise in film history, but it also leads to the blank stares in the opening minutes of the video below. Check it out for some truly ear-opening examples of how and why so many big movies sound alike, as well as an inspired rendition of the one Marvel song one of Zhou's interviewees could recite by heart.

See more from the Every Frame a Painting film essay series here.

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