Michael Giacchino, a franchise composer at his best without one

Michael Giacchino

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Born	October 10, 1967 Riverside Township, New Jersey, U.S.
Occupation	Film composer
Known for	Ratatouille, Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, Star Wars: The Force Awakens
Awards	Academy Award · Golden Globe · BAFTA · 3 Grammy · Emmy

Few composers in Hollywood have been handed as many inherited themes as Michael Giacchino. He has carried Alexander Courage’s fanfare into Star Trek, John Williams’s dinosaurs into Jurassic World and Williams’s galaxy into Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, and the studios keep trusting him with other people’s music because he handles it with a fan’s care. Yet the pieces most likely to outlive those franchises are the ones nobody asked him to protect: a sliding brass figure on a mysterious island in Lost, a waltz for a marriage told without a word of dialogue in Up, a swaggering big-band brass line for a family of retired superheroes in The Incredibles.

That split runs through his whole career, and it explains the odd shape of his fame. Audiences hum the tunes. Far fewer could name the man who wrote them, even after an Oscar, three Grammys and a run of scores attached to some of the most-watched films of the century.

From film school to the PlayStation

Giacchino grew up in Edgewater Park, in southern New Jersey, after being born in nearby Riverside Township on October 10, 1967; he holds both American and Italian citizenship. He studied film production at the School of Visual Arts in New York, graduating in 1990, while taking music classes at Juilliard on the side and, later, night courses in orchestration at UCLA.

The route into scoring went through the side door of the studio system. An internship at Universal turned into a job, then a publicity post at Disney, then a producer role at Disney Interactive, where he began writing music for 16-bit games such as Gargoyles and Maui Mallard in Cold Shadow. His first major commission was the game of The Lost World: Jurassic Park for DreamWorks. DreamWorks Interactive then gave him Medal of Honor, a Second World War shooter built on a story by Steven Spielberg, and Giacchino answered with a full orchestral score for a 1999 PlayStation release, a luxury at a time when most console games still ran on synthesized music.

Abrams, Bird and Pixar

J. J. Abrams brought him to television with Alias in 2001 and kept him for Lost three years later. The falling brass gesture that punctuated the island drama’s cliffhangers became one of the most recognisable sounds of the decade on American television, and the pilot alone won him a Primetime Emmy.

Brad Bird then took him into feature animation with The Incredibles in 2004, a score that plays like a 1960s spy film with a family budget. Ratatouille followed, earning his first Oscar nomination and a Grammy. Then came Up, whose four-minute “Married Life” sequence carries an entire marriage on a single theme. That score won the Academy Award, the Golden Globe, the BAFTA and two more Grammys. It also fixed the version of Giacchino that critics still prefer: the melodist who can make a cinema go silent.

Pixar kept calling. Inside Out and Coco each brought another Annie Award, and the partnership with Bird moved into live action with Tomorrowland in 2015.

The custodian

Abrams’s Star Trek reboot in 2009 opened the second track of his career: the composer who can walk into a beloved property, respect what came before and still leave a theme of his own. Jurassic World and its two sequels followed, then Rogue One: A Star Wars Story and a string of Marvel films, including three Spider-Man pictures starting with Spider-Man: Homecoming. Rogue One was the extreme case. When reshoots pushed Alexandre Desplat off the film, Giacchino stepped in with roughly four and a half weeks to write the entire score.

This is where the praise needs a counterweight. A large share of his most-heard music is maintenance work on themes written by Williams or Courage, and the blockbuster system rewards quotation over risk. His habit of giving cues pun titles, a running joke across his soundtrack albums, reads to some listeners as charm and to others as a sign that the job is not being taken entirely seriously. He dropped the puns for Society of the Snow, J. A. Bayona’s Andes survival drama, out of respect for the victims of the crash. Even The Batman, his darkest and most admired franchise score, earned its reputation by building a superhero around a slow, ominous motif instead of a fanfare, which is to say by refusing what the genre usually asks of him.

The music he chooses for himself points somewhere else entirely. In 2020 he released Travelogue Volume 1, his first album with no film attached, recorded with a group he called the Nouvelle Modernica Orchestra: jazzy, lounge-era piano music framed by the narration of an alien visitor describing Earth. It is the clearest statement of taste he has made.

Behind the camera

Giacchino has been edging toward the director’s chair for years. After a short episode in the Star Trek universe, he directed and scored Werewolf by Night, a black-and-white Marvel horror special for Disney+ in 2022. In January 2023 Warner Bros. announced him as director of a remake of the 1954 giant-ant film Them!, which he has described as a story about immigration told through a monster movie; no cast or start date has been confirmed. Music runs in the family. His son, Mick Giacchino, is also a composer who has co-written themes with him, and his brother Anthony is a documentary filmmaker.

Both tracks at once

The franchise track has never been louder. Spider-Man: Brand New Day, directed by Destin Daniel Cretton, opened on July 31, 2026, to about $360 million in North America, the biggest domestic debut on record, and Sony Classical released a 26-track album that reworks the Spider-Man theme he introduced in 2017 into something sparer and lonelier. Reviews split along familiar lines: one critic found the restraint dull, another argued that Giacchino had found fresh ideas inside a fourth Spider-Man film.

The other track is back too. On October 10, 2026, his 59th birthday, Bird’s Ray Gunn had its world premiere at the BFI London Film Festival, carrying a Giacchino score recorded at Abbey Road and original songs by Kimbra. The retro-futurist animated adventure, voiced by Sam Rockwell and Scarlett Johansson, opens in a limited US theatrical run on December 4 and arrives on Netflix on December 18. It is the pair’s first original feature together since Tomorrowland, and it puts Giacchino back where his most durable music has always come from: a story with no theme to inherit.

Tags: singers, composers, Spider-Man: Brand New Day, Brad Bird, Ray Gunn, Michael Giacchino