10 Awesome Musical Scores That Deserved Better Movies

Despite dabbling in many genres, Steven Spielberg has never before made a musical (something that he will finally remedy with his take on West Side Story, released next year), but he came very close with this muddled mess of a Peter Pan sequel. And maybe it would have been better if he had, because it's the music that's the one thing to emerge from Hook with any credit.

Spielberg's regular collaborator John Williams threw himself into the idea of a Pan musical, penning eight original songs before the musical concept was discarded. Only two of these remain in the finished feature, but the melodies of the others are woven throughout Williams's more traditional orchestral score.

Even for someone well known for his ability with leitmotifs and strong character themes, the fact that he had already penned these melodies as individual songs gives Williams's Hook score an impressive number of hummable tunes.

It's also exciting for a man with such a history of scoring adventure stories to get to do a pirate movie and the climactic fight scene between Pan and Hook gives Williams an unbroken twenty minutes of thrilling, swooping, swashbuckling sounds.

And, hey, for all its flaws at least this Peter Pan reimagining at no point involves the pirate crew breaking into a rendition of Smells Like Teen Spirit.