Pharrell Williams of the Neptunes and N.E.R.D.

For his next outing with the web-crawler, Marc Webb seems to be making more moves to separate his Amazing Spider-Man franchise from the Sam Raimi Spider-Man trilogy. First, Webb chose two villains that did not appear at all in Raimi’s trilogy: Electro (Jamie Foxx) and the Rhino (Paul Giamatti). Then, Marc Webb enlisted the help of Hans Zimmer, the composer mostly known in the superhero movie world as the man who scored Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy and subsequently Man of Steel, both DC properties. Now Webb and Zimmer have been talking about bringing Pharrell Williams on board, as well as The Smith’s Johnny Marr, Incubus guitarist Mike Einziger, and Zimmer’s Madagascar 3 co-composer Dave Williams. This comes off of Pharrell’s collaboration with Daft Punk for arguably the biggest song of 2013: “Get Lucky.”

Hans Zimmer (left) with Pharrell Williams (right)

Johnny Marr of The Smiths

Hans Zimmer might be the single most sought after film composer today. Along with scoring The Amazing Spider-Man 2, he is currently working on Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar and Akiva Goldsman’s Winter’s Tale. Zimmer has worked before with Pharrell on Despicable Me, and Johnny Marr played on Zimmer’s score for The Lone Ranger. What sets this supergroup collaboration apart is the different approach that Zimmer and Webb are going to take for creating music for film. In a press release, Hans Zimmer talked about how this came about:

Director] Marc [Webb] and I were talking about Spider-Man, and as the word got out, so many of our friends and musicians started calling us up, wanting to be a part of it, because they love Spider-Man. With all of these hugely talented people wanting to join us, it was Marc who said, ‘Why not start a band?’

Musician Dave Stewart

While it is well known that Pharrell Williams (N.E.R.D), Johnny Marr (The Smiths), and Mike Einziger (Incubus) all have experience in being in bands, as well as composing, people might not remember (or ever heard of) Krakatoa, the band that Zimmer played keyboards and synthesizers for at the beginning of his career. It’s unknown how a band would play out in this context. Pharrell’s work on Despicible Me consisted of playing drums and Marr and Einziger have the guitars riffs covered (a mix of Incubus and The Smiths will be very interesting to hear against hip-hop drums), which would mean that Zimmer might be underscoring the entire effort with his trademark driving orchestration.

Mike Einziger of Incubus

We’ll have to see how it all plays out when The Amazing Spider-Man 2 releases next May.