Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross are the surprising, but inspired choice to score Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem.
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem is getting a much higher profile score than anyone thought, with none other than Tony Hawk leaking the news that Nine Inch Nails’ Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross are scoring the animated film. The movie’s director, Jeff Rowe, confirmed the news on Twitter, writing:
“Well now that my teenage hero @tonyhawk has leaked that my music heroes are doing this I can add that the score is absolutely AMAZING. Exhilarating, terrifying, heartbreaking, full of sounds I didn’t know existed. I don’t have the vocabulary to describe it. I love it so much.”
Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross are generally regarded as the top movie composers in Hollywood, with the two notorious for being picky about the films and TV shows they sign on to. Notably, the two bowed out of scoring The Woman in the Window when it underwent extensive reshoots, and Reznor went on record saying that he thought their score for Netflix’s Bird Box was “a f*cking waste of time.”
Their most recent scores include Bones and All, Empire of Light, Mank and Pixar’s Soul. In addition to Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem, this year, the two are poised to score David Fincher’s The Killer, and Luca Guadagnino’s Challengers, starring Zendaya.
While Ross and Reznor may seem like atypical choices to score an animated movie like this, the early footage that I saw at CinemaCon promised that Mutant Mayhem is more in the mode of something like Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse than any previous Ninja Turtles movie, so there’s a chance that when this movie opens on August 2nd, it might be something really special.