by Ryan Keaveney

Danny Elfman

Updated 1/22/10! In November I brought you the news about Danny Elfman and his unceremonious booting from Universal Pix’s The Wolf Man, a film so thoroughly manhandled by the studio that it laid waste to an unknown number of marketing interns, required an assembly of editors, composers and wholesale replacement of Rick Baker’s make-up effects with bulging CGI.

In a move no doubt meant to downplay the grandiose heritage of the legendary Wolf Man character (because old is crap, right?), after a disastrous suburban test screening, the filmmakers swapped Elfman for Paul Haslinger, whose atmospheric, pulsing electronic scores for the first and third, color-drained Underworld films was no doubt what the marketing department and studio honcho geniuses thought would be a notch up on the wicked awesome scale from Elfman’s decidedly old-fashioned approach.

Now, if you thought that was the end of it, well you’d be wrong, as there is one final (is there such a thing as “final” in the Wolf Man world?) twist in this story, and that is that some if not most of Elfman’s music is back in the film. Which means Haslinger is out and additional composers have been brought back in to stitch it all together using ideas from Elfman’s material. One name is Conrad Pope, a gifted and accomplished composer (his score for the obscure drama Pavillion of Women garnered much praise back in 2001), who has also worked extensively as an orchestrator for Danny Elfman (Sleepy Hollow), John Williams (Harry Potter and The Sorcerer’s Stone), Alexandre Desplat (The Curious Case of Benjamin Button), Alan Silvestri (A Christmas Carol) and others. Pope, and a team of other composers will contribute about 25-30 minutes of additional music.

Update 1/22/10: Only Conrad Pope has contributed additional music to the film. No other composers are on the project.

Elfman, meanwhile, is busy recording his score for Tim Burton’s Alice In Wonderland, and therefore unavailable to write additional music and or revise cues (you have to wonder if he’d be willing at this point).

Stay tuned, because at this moment it is not yet February 12, 2010, which is when The Wolf Man is finally unleashed into theaters. Or will it?