Hans Zimmer Gave Up Scoring 'Batman' Movies Because Of Zack Snyder's Version Of The Dark Knight

After Hans Zimmer completed his work on Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, he shared the news that he was no longer scoring comic book movies. "[Batman v Superman] was very hard for me to do, to try to find new language," he told BBC Hardtalk. "I did Batman Begins with Chris [Nolan] 12 years ago, so The Dark Knight trilogy might be three movies to you; to me, it was 11 years of my life." A part of the reason why he might've struggled to find a new language is because, during those 11 years, he was inspired by what Christian Bale brought to Batman.

Below, learn more about why we won't have the pleasure of experiencing more Hans Zimmer Batman scores.

Zimmer was drawn to the pain Bale brought to the caped crusader. Bale's take on Bruce Wayne was a little more melancholic than Affleck's, who played the superhero as a damaged raging bull. They're entirely different depictions of the superhero, but the version Affleck played didn't interest Zimmer the way Nolan and Bale's take did. "It just did my brain in to have written Christian Bale as Batman, and suddenly it's Ben Affleck," Zimmer told

"It just did my brain in to have written Christian Bale as Batman, and suddenly it's Ben Affleck," Zimmer told Inverse while promoting his Master Class. "And it felt like I was betraying everything Christian had done. So there's a certain amount of loyalty attached to those movies, as well."

He continued:

I spent months trying to come up with something for Ben. The Batman that I know and the one I learned is the one that Christian did, and Ben plays it differently. And I can't quite shake that off. For me, the Christian Bale character was always completely unresolved. It was always about that moment at the beginning of the first movie, where he sees his parents getting killed. It was basically arrested development. The Ben character is more middle-aged, he seems to be grumpy as hell but I didn't feel the pain that I felt in Christian's performance. And it was that pain that made me interested.

The composer isn't saying one performance is better than the other. One of them – the one he was responding to for over a decade – just had a component that isn't a part of Affleck's Batman. For the most part, his performance as Batman is more bleak than sad.

Zimmer wants to keep discovering "new styles of music and new ways of using technology, new ways of figuring out how to make everything that we do an experience for other people," which he felt superhero movies wouldn't allow him to do. Some people thought he was crazy for writing off scoring superhero films, effectively turning down some high-profile jobs, but Zimmer isn't chasing bucks, so he's more than okay passing on those gigs.