Hans Zimmer is quite good, and I think his work would lend itself well to the sweeping space opera of Star Wars. His themes for Gladiator and Pirates of the Caribbean are favorites of mine:
If he’s not available, Klaus Badelt has worked closely with him and has a very similar style.
Oscar-winning Italian composer Dario Marianelli is also very talented; here’s an excerpt from Pride & Prejudice:
Jean-Claude Petit took a great neoclassical turn in his score for Cyrano de Bergerac a few years back:
I loved Elfman’s work on the Spiderman movies, and of course the Simpsons theme.
Alan Silvestri is also pretty impressive, to me, and has done a nice range of film genres, including Forrest Gump, Predator, and Marvel’s The Avengers.
I’ll fourth or fifth Horner. His scpore for The Rocketeer, especially the opening, is one of my favorites, and his classic style in that score matches up pretty nicely with that of Williams in the Star Wars films.
And that one, at least, has plenty of strings (like Williams’ Star Wars themes), not overdone horns.
If he were still alive, I’d like to see Bernard Hermann do it. He not only has plenty of good rep for Hitchcock and other classic cinema, but he was particularly notable for fantasy and Sf film – The Day the Earth Stood Still, a lot of Harryhausen stuff (including Seventh Voyage of Sinbad and Jason and the Argonauts – talk about a lot of horns, he deliberately stayed away from strings there). His last film score was for It’s Alive! His style was completely unlike Williams’, but it would certainly have fit with the subject matter.
Hans Zimmer is slated to do the score for the Superman reboot. This will essentially be the first new Superman theme in 35 years since John Williams set the standard with the first Christopher Reeve film. If he can pull this off, create a worthy replacement for Williams’ Superman motif, then I’d give him the Star Wars job!
Me too - in fact, I thought it was a deliberate Blue Harvest reference(warning: Polish site, although the clip is in English).
I was going to nominate either Horner or the guy who scored the Star Trek reboot, who upon checking turns out to be the aforementioned Michael Giacchino.
Yeah, I’ll play along too, since the original version didn’t mention people who are already working within the franchise.
Joel McNeely did the Shadows of the Empire sound track. This wasn’t a movie, but a series of books. I think the music was for the audio book version. It’s not my favorite, and I’m not real impressed with the rest of his work.
Kevin Kiner is credited (or at least co-credited) with the music for both the Clone Wars cartoon and the Rebels cartoon. Given that these are more recent and include an actual Disney project, he’d be a logical choice and from what I’ve heard (Star Wars cartoons and Hell on Wheels), he could probably pull it off.
