Disney Pictures’ upcoming “Jungle Cruise” film, based on the theme park ride, boasts a familiar composer in the form of eight-time Oscar nominee James Newton Howard (“The Fugitive,” “The Village”). What is unexpected however is that Howard has collaborated with iconic band Metallica on the film, a movie.
The band’s drummer Lars Ulrich recently spoke to Collider and offered his first thoughts on the collaboration saying that his friendship with Disney production president and lifelong rock fan Sean Bailey was the driver and they’ve always “looked for the right match where there was a way that Metallica could contribute to some project of theirs”.
This ended up being the right fit and Ulrich has nothing but praise for his composer and hints at what they’re doing:
“It’s kind of an interesting morph, because it’s kind of – and I don’t want to give too much of it away – but it’s a very unusual morph in that it’s kind of his arrangement of “Nothing Else Matters” that we’re playing. We wrote the song, but he took the song and rearranged it to fit something specific in the film – and obviously, I’m not going to give any of that away – but we then kind of took on his version of it. I think that’s all that should be said.”
“Jungle Cruise” follows a wisecracking boat captain (Dwayne Johnson) who teams up with a scientist (Emily Blunt) to uncover an ancient tree with unparalleled healing abilities hidden in Amazon rainforest. The film had been slated for release this summer before Disney delayed it a year to July 30th 2021. Edgar Ramirez, Jesse Plemons, Jack Whitehall and Paul Giamatti co-star.