I enjoyed the first mega-arc of Marvel movies, from Iron Man to Avengers: Endgame, though like a lot of viewers I haven’t really followed things since.¹ But I have been thinking for years about what I think was the single biggest missed opportunity in the entire franchise: music.

Marvel had gobs of money, access to many of Hollywood’s top composers, and the opportunity to craft a coherent musical identity for their characters and franchise. They pretty much blew it.

The Avengers movies proper mostly have internal musical continuity because they were mostly scored by Alan Silvestri. (Age of Ultron being the exception, with its score by Brian Tyler and Danny Elfman; it at least maintained the main theme.) Silvestri incorporated his own theme from Captain America: The First Avenger and Ludwig Görannson’s theme for Black Panther, but There are bits of continuity here and there otherwise as well: Henry Jackman’s scores for Captain America: The Winter Soldier and Captain America: Civil War have some touch points (though fewer than I would have expected!), and Brian Tyler’s work across Thor: The Dark World, Iron Man 3, and Ultron likewise has a little cross-referencing. But (as far as I recall) Jackman and Tyler completely dropped Silvestri’s Captain America theme and Patrick Doyle’s Thor themes. Mark Mothersbaugh’s score for Thor: Ragnarok was fun but once again went off and did its own thing.

I could keep going, but the point is: it’s easy to imagine a world where Marvel asked each composer to bring their own voice to the project while maintaining the musical identities of core characters, places, and ideas. And the result would have been a lot more musical interest, rather than the frankly bland wash of generic action hero sounds we got instead.

A few examples that have done this much better:

• Star Wars, of course. For all the criticisms I have of both the prequel and sequel trilogies, and for all that the latter is distinctly not John Williams’ best work, the musical coherence and thematic integrity of the saga make a lot of weak moments of filmmaking work at all rather than not. Moreover, even considering secondary films and works like Rogue One, Solo: A Star Wars Story, The Mandalorian, and other Disney+ content, use of the integral Star Wars musical material works to integrate , even as the other musical material is at times uneven. (Göransson’s initial work for The Mandalorian is great; Giacchino’s score for Rogue One less so — and so on.) Notably, Andor did not do this, and to good effect: but that is clearly an intentional choice reflective of the intent to build a very different tone for the show.

• The Halo games have nailed this: despite having totally different composers working on the project after the transition from one game company to another (Bungie to 343 Industries) between Halo: Reach and Halo 4. Listening to the scores for Halo 4, Halo 5, and Halo Infinite is listening to new composers stamp their own sound on iconic themes as well as introducing new ones — quite effectively, in some cases.²

There is a risk with these approaches. Music can end up being simply derivative and uninteresting this way. Composers want the freedom to do their own invention and work. (Trust me: I know!) But it still represents a huge missed opportunity to tie the scores together and to make something more than the sum of the parts. What we ended up with is much less than the sum of its parts.