All of 2025’s Superhero Movies Have One Amazing Thing in Common (And Doomsday Could Continue the Trend)

Videos by ComicBook.com

However, something does bind all of these titles: they’ve each delivered exceptional film scores. Even the otherwise uneven Brave New World featured inspired orchestral musical flourishes courtesy of composer Laura Karpman. It’s an exciting phenomenon and, with Alan Silvestri returning to compose Avengers: Doomsday, it could be continuing into the near future.

2025 Superhero Film Scores Have Been Way Better Than Normal

Throughout the 2010s, it became common knowledge that superhero film scores left something to be desired. Countless video essays and long-form thinkpieces were written about how these titles epitomized modern problems plaguing movie scores. The early 2020s didn’t offer much of a balm for these problems, save for Michael Giacchino’s The Batman compositions, Bobby Krlic’s Blue Beetle score, or Ludwig Göransson’s Black Panther: Wakanda Forever tracks. Titles like The Flash, Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, and Black Adam just had no personality in their scores.

Suddenly, 2025’s superhero movies, especially the ones released in summer 2025, have changed that paradigm radically. Part of that simply comes down to whose been chosen to score these features. Too many modern superhero movies resort to the same composers. Lorne Balfe, for example, composed Black Adam and Black Widow, Benjamin Wallfisch did Kraven the Hunter and The Flash, and Tom Holkenborg has composed all three Sonic the Hedgehog movies. Leaning on just folks from Hans Zimmer’s Remote Control Productions camp inevitably seeps in sonic saminess into these scores.

Meanwhile, Thunderbolts* deployed the band Son Lux on only their third feature film scoring assignment ever. Superman co-composer John Murphy had scored two other James Gunn-directed superhero movies, but the film’s other composer, David Fleming, isn’t a superhero movie veteran at all. To boot, Murphy and Fleming had never worked on a film score together before, resulting in the Superman soundtrack having a unique sound compared to the rest of their works. Just trying new things in who to hire instantly launched the scores of these 2025 superhero movies off on the right foot.

To boot, the classical sensibilities of Superman and First Steps helped imbue each title with distinctively old-school music cues separating them from typical superhero movie scores. That trend of leaning into what a movie needs sonically rather than mimicking a recent popular Zimmer score also served Thunderbolts* and its off-kilter score well. These Son Lux tracks sounded so dissonant and askew, making them a perfect musical extension of the film’s psychologically challenged lead characters. In contrast, it was hard to find any traces of character-specific personality in The Flash or Black Adam’s respective scores.

Standalone Stories Open Up The Door For More Distinctive Musical Personalities

It didn’t hurt that this year’s superhero films (save for Brave New World and its overdose of Incredible Hulk mythos) were largely standalone features. That opened up the door for folks like Fleming & Murphy or Fantastic Four’s Giacchino to create specific musical identities that weren’t beholden to what other superhero movies were doing. Compare that to Christophe Beck’s Quantumania score, which was so vaguely defined seemingly to ensure it didn’t trample on the identities of potential future Marvel Cinematic Universe movies spinning off Quantumania.

Thunderbolts*, meanwhile, reveled in its unique musical identity without caring about how it could affect the orchestral music of Spider-Man: Brand New Day. Even Brave New World had some trumpet-heavy sections of its score that interestingly departed from Henry Jackman’s musical sensibilities for The Falcon and the Winter Soldier’s score. Excitingly, these creative score approaches of 2025 superhero cinema might not go out the window once the year ends. After all, master film composer Alan Silvestri is returning to the Avengers saga to score Avengers: Doomsday.

Not only did Silvestri do excellent work scoring his three previous Avengers film assignments, but he’s also an enjoyably bombastic old-school composer who doesn’t shy away from pronounced film scores. He’s more prone to exuding personality and very precise creative choices rather than channeling the subdued, generic tendencies of Henry Jackman or Ramin Djawadi. All the potential in the world is there for Silvestri to deliver further greatness with Doomsday. If he does, then it’ll be a great follow-up to 2025’s bevy of terrific and specifically realized superhero film scores in titles like The Fantastic Four: First Steps, Thunderbolts*, and Superman.

What do you think? Leave a comment below and join the conversation now in the ComicBook Forum!