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Both Part 1 and 2 are probably the worst night exteriors I've seen in movies. Okay, maybe that last one is unfair. At least it spins around and you get light from the castle! I guess they aren't quite as terrible in super high-res but these were pretty bad from my memory of seeing them in a theater, especially the 3D versions.

Someone should try re-grading a few shots or maybe even a full clip from the last couple of Harry Potter films. It would be interesting to see the results, and if the film's dark atmosphere still is apparent even if there's color. EDIT: Look, someone did do that! Would you believe it, there's a beautiful film hiding under that layer of grit and grime!

It gets so bad in DH Pt. 1 that, if you aren't sitting in a completely dark room with only the glow of the TV, you can't see what's going on at some points.

JNH will be the only colour in the film.

I'd absolutely love a complete Born on the Fourth of July!!

Someone really needs to have a quiet word in Yates' ear about this magical new discovery called COLOUR. I know it's hard to believe, David, but you can actually make films without setting the saturation dial to -75 in every single shot.

It looks like one of those movies that's fun to watch once, but it's so vapid you can't remember anything at all about it once it's over. It also looks like they've washed out all the color again...

Pointless, lazy, yawn.

Agreed! ? One of my all-time favorites. Now that we're getting JFK too, they should release a complete Nixon too.

I've seen the live action remake of The Lion King. It's called the Broadway version. This CGI version is just a cash grab for all the nostalgic children who saw the animated movie and are now parents, who need another video in the rotation.

More to watch than can ever be watched.

It's a shame that we've gotten to a point where we expect bad film decisions to be made so frequently.

Fuckin' A!

John Debney?

Absolutely stunning smaller moments among the unreleased material. It is Williams at his most heartachingly lyrical.

I think that's a pretty strong candidate for their 2016 release

And every website that reports this as a "live-action remake" just makes my eye twitch. If all the characters and most of the sets are CG, it's not live-action!

Oh man, if Williams actually read 90% of what we say about him here, he'd never stop throwing up.

If there's anything I can't stand about modern movie fandom, it's the obsession with trailers. I couldn't care less what the trailers are like or what music they use. Whatever floats your boat I guess.

Well, when I listen to the "The Bare Necessities" from the Hit house, I hear this :

Cripes, some very euphoric descriptions of latter-day Williams here. Figures that when I finally encounter some positivity on this board, it's in an area where I'm rather negative. It is my opinion that BFG -- like almost all of Williams' genre scores in the last 10 years -- suffers from "approximation syndrome", i.e. he's trying to approximate a more consonant sound he nurtured with ease in the 90s and before, whereas his own preference these days lies with stuff like "Scherzo for Piano and Orchestra" and "Conversations". Exploring more avantgarde and modern soundscapes. So these approximations become half-baked. That's not to say that BFG, TFA, TINTIN, INDY 4 etc. don't have values -- of course they do! -- but they're relegated to moments rather than an overarching, consistent level of quality. Williams has been at his best and most consistent in recent years with more "serious" fare, like LINCOLN, WAR HORSE (OK, except BOOK THIEF; that also suffered from 'approximation syndrome').

I often listen to BFG in the car and always discover new nuances and details. it is such a finely crafted, exquisite score. Sure, there are similarities to other JW scores, but if I would never have heard one other JW score before, I would be totally blown away by this and see it as the best score of the decade, just for the quality of the composition and instrumentation. And even with the knowledge of all the JW scores before, I like it very much. And I am slowly becoming convinced that since 2010 we are witnessing a second golden era of JW scores with Tintin, War Horse, TFA and BFG, second only to his 1977-1984 phase.

I found it to be quite strong album really, very elegant and very subtly crafted. It took quite a few listen to get into this one fully. But considering he has 10 (with Rogue One it was 11) projects slated for this year alone, it is rather amazing he can keep the quality this high none the less.

One of the most intriguing things I find about the score is that, despite Williams' evolving writing style over the last 25 years, this could easily pass as a score he wrote in the early 90s. He really is a chameleon composer in that respect. It makes scores like the Star Wars prequels and KOTCS even more fascinating, given the way they 'feel' quite different to the SW and IJ scores from the 80s. With the prequels especially, there's a clear evolution of writing style and orchestral textures used.

Hayley Atwell has been hounding Marvel for an Agent Carter movie Good!

The Hit House is another trailer music production company that's been involved in making a few interesting custom mixes lately (most notably their "Bare Necessities" arrangements for the live-action Jungle Book film). Nine times out of ten, though, the general public doesn't and can't know which companies are involved until the day the trailer releases (at which time the companies go to Facebook or wherever and get all excited).

It has grown on me, but not nearly in the same capacity as, say, TFA was for me a couple months after release. With The BFG, it went from me thinking it was okay to then being good, whereas TFA went from being good to a masterpiece. Never before has a score grown that much on me upon first listen. It's honestly a little silly how much my opinion improved on it, as I regard it now as one of the best film scores of the last 15 years. Perhaps The BFG hasn't been able to blossom in the same way for me, because I haven't brought it into the light for an objective and isolated listening experience free from expectations, and instead have it still firmly planted mentally in TFA's shadow, which is a quite unfair thing for me to do to it.

So what do we think is the most likely candidate for a JW release from LLL coming out this year? We know its not JFK or Towering Inferno. I was looking at this thread to see what film studios LLL works with often. Fox is easy to work with by any label, but other than Towering Inferno, none of those seem like likely candidates. SpaceCamp is in print by Intrada, Book Thief is too new, and Paper Chase and Conrack are too short. One film that I had previously though impossible that could be it is Minority Report. It's kind of in the same category as A.I. Artificial Intelligence - that one was distributed by WB in the US, and Dreamworks internationally, and Dreamworks had never had an expanded score released before. When AI happened, I realized that Minority Report could be possible - that one is distributed to Fox in the US, and Dreamworks internationally, so basically the same state as AI but with a different studio. Luckily, LLL works with box studios. Disney pretty much only works with Intrada, so Nixon's out. The only Williams titles left at MGM are Fiddler on the Roof and Stanley and Iris. Stanley and Iris is Varese property in perpetuity, so it can't be that. I doubt its Fiddler either, but its possible! It's the 45th anniversary this year, as well. LLL has released a lot of Paramount titles, since they opened the Paramount gates with Airplane!. I think The Reivers, Sabrina, or Angela's Ashes are all possible! I'm not sure how much unreleased music exists for any of those, though. LLL has worked with Sony a few times before, notably on their Hook expansion 4 years ago. I have no idea if any elements exist for older scores like Daddy-O, Because They're Young, or Gidget Goes To Rome, or if those would sell enough to warrant the expense. Could it be CE3K, Seven Years in Tibet, Stepmom, or The Patriot? CE3K has its 40th anniversary next year, and Tibet has its 20th next year, and I doubt Stepmom would be a worthwhile investment, so I'm going to guess no on those, leaving The Patriot as the best guess from Sony. Next up is Warner Brothers, a label LLL has a great relationship with. Of course we got Empire of the Sun, Rosewood, and AI Artificial Intelligence form them, but LLL has also released a ton of WB titles by other composers, including a special branded 90th Anniversary line and an ongoing Expanded Archival Collection line. So, let's start with what it couldn't be: It can't be The Cowboys, as Varese snatched up perpetuity right. It can't be The Accidental Tourist, and the FSM edition is still in print. It can't be JFK, as we know that's planned for 2017 or later. It's also predicted that Varese has perpetuity rights to Presumed Innocent as well. So what does that leave? I think The Witches of Eastwick is a very strong possibility. MV posted in the past that they wanted to expand it but Robin Esterhammer got the rights before he could, and his Perseverance Records label did a straight re-issue of the OST program. Now that the Perseverance release is OOP, did LLL snag up the rights? I think its likely! It should be noted, though, that next year is the 20th anniversary, so maybe they'd wait for that. Another possibility is Sleepers, which has its 20th anniversary this year. I have no idea how much unreleased music there is, though. Of course, the big kahuna in the Warner Brothers catalog is Harry Potter. Has the big WB finally allowed a specialty label to work on their biggest franchise? Let's hope so! This year is not only the 15th anniversary of the new film, but the next chapter of their franchise is opening in theaters, so it'd be a good time to begin re-issuing the old scores, I'd say. Fingers crossed! And that brings us to our final studio, Universal. LLL hasn't released a lot of Universal titles at all, but they released a very important one, and that's 1941, the first Williams/Spielberg expansion by a specialty label. As far as I know Varese still has the rights to Earthquake, The Eiger Sanction, and Dracula. And supposedly JW still doesn't want The Sugarland Express to be released. What about his older scores? Could LLL have found elements for The Secret Ways, The Killers, The Rare Breed, The Plainsman, Sergeant Ryker, Story of a Woman, The Screaming Woman, or Pete 'n' Tillie? There are many tantalizing newer scores in the Williams / Universal catalog as well - E.T., The River, Born on the Fourth of July, Always, Far and Away, Jurassic Park, Schindler's List, and The Lost World. How amazing would it be if LLL and Matessino teamed up for any of those? So I guess after going through all that, I still have no idea what this year's title could be. If I had to pick the five most likely candidates, I think I'd have to go with 1 Far and Away [Universal] 2 Minority Report [Fox] 3 The Patriot [Sony] 4 The Reivers [Paramount] 5 Sleepers [WB] But I really have no idea at all.

That's actually pretty average for models.

Wasn't sure where to post this so I just chose the most recent Potter-related thread in the John Williams section. Here's a nice 5-6 minute discussion of Williams' Harry Potter music with David Arnold participating in the discussion! http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b07vw5mn The part about Potter starts at about 25:00 in.

Take your son, over JW, always!

I'm likely one of the very few who liked the score from the start, so I'm likely biased. But further listenings revealed more nuances and lots of details I truly enjoy. Also, my appreciation of the score grew after seeing the film--there's a theatrical quality in the film (despite the technology) that Williams captured very well. It's surely a score that covers a ground Williams already explored well (and maybe better) in past scores, but it's filled with such graceful fun that I can't help but enjoy it.

Jennie's Theme from The Rocketeer again. Horner really went all-in with that concert arrangement, covering not just love but a deep yearning in the middle of the piece.

Not a score, but listened to Elfman's Rabbit & Rogue. Some really good stuff going on there, neat orchestration, cool transitions, and nice transitioning between large and intimate moments. I have been largely indifferent toward Elfman's film music for at least 10 years, but this was a welcome change.

Some of you might find this interesting. A few years ago I typeset the "Clash of the Lightsabers" (AKA Through the Window) cue from Empire Strikes Back and only used what was in JW's sketch before it was delivered to the orchestrator. You can see from here that every single note, all percussion, every voicing, and every articulation was already there. There were two or three minor note changes from the sketch to what's in the final recording but overall you can see these are very detailed sketches and definitely something that can go straight to a copyist. Excuse the bad mockup sound - this is just dumped out of Sibelius with no attempt made for realism. JW_-_EmpireStrikesBack-R11m1_Through_the_Window.mp3