This First ‘Logan’ Soundtrack Excerpt Is Giving Us a Horror Movie Vibe

If you’ve spent the past few weeks caught up in holiday and family time, you might have missed the announcement that Cliff Martinez would no longer be writing the music for Logan, ostensibly the final movie in Hugh Jackman’s decades-long run as Wolverine. As pointed out by sites like Birth.Movies.Death, at some point in the last few months, director James Mangold had quietly brought back Marco Beltrami, the composer from 2013’s The Wolverine, to bang out a soundtrack for the March release. And now, thanks to the director’s Twitter account (via iO9), we’ve got our first look (listen?) at the music for Logan.

Owing perhaps to Beltrami’s roots as a horror film composer  —  he broke into Hollywood in the late nineties with soundtracks for movies like Scream, The Faculty, and Mimic  —  this first snippet seems to highlight the nightmarish future for Wolverine that we’ve seen hinted at in the first Logan trailer. And based on this little excerpt, I’m pretty pumped. I’ve mentioned this before, but the popular Every Frame A Painting video on the Marvel movies does an excellent job of demonstrating why soundtracks are a major weakness of the current wave of comic book movies. Whatever the final result of the movie might be, at least Logan seems to make itself heard.

For those keeping track at home, Logan is also the second high-profile movie to lose its composer in the eleventh hour. Back in November, we wrote about Rogue One composer Michael Giacchino stepping in at the last minute and only having four weeks to write the music for the movie. Let’s hope that this replacement works out better than the other one; having only seen Rogue One this past week, I was a bit taken aback by how awkwardly the music seem wedged between classic Star Wars tracks and its own attempts at a distinctive sound. Fingers crossed that the new Logan soundtrack ushers in a new era of creativity.

Logan will slash its way into theaters on March 3, 2017.