John Powell (film composer)

John Powell is an English composer best known for his film scores. He has been based in Los Angeles since 1997 and has composed the scores to over 70 feature films. He is best known for composing the scores for films such as Face/Off, the Bourne film series, the Happy Feet films, United 93, X-Men: The Last Stand, Wicked and its upcoming sequel For Good, Evolution, Dr. Seuss' The Lorax, Migration, Drumline, Hancock, The Call of the Wild, Bolt, eight Blue Sky Studios films, and nine DreamWorks Animation films.
His work on Happy Feet, Ferdinand and Solo: A Star Wars Story has earned him three Grammy nominations. He was nominated for two Academy Awards for How to Train Your Dragon and Wicked.
Powell was a member of Hans Zimmer's music studio, Remote Control Productions, and has collaborated frequently with other composers from the studio, including Harry Gregson-Williams on Antz, Chicken Run and Shrek and Zimmer himself on Chill Factor, The Road to El Dorado, and the first two Kung Fu Panda films.
He has also collaborated with film directors such as Carlos Saldanha, Dean DeBlois, Chris Sanders, Jon M. Chu, George Miller, John Woo, Ron Underwood, Doug Liman, Charles Stone III and Paul Greengrass.
As a child, he played the violin and viola. He studied the violin at the Trinity College of Music, central London (now the Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance in Greenwich, London). There, he met John Ashton Thomas, who orchestrated many of Powell's scores. Powell played for "Faboulistics", an amateur rock and roll band.
After finishing college, he composed music for commercials, which led to a job as an assistant to the composer Patrick Doyle on several film productions, including Much Ado About Nothing. In 1995, Powell co-founded the London-based commercial music house Independently Thinking Music with Gavin Greenaway, which produced scores for more than 100 British and French commercials and independent films.
Powell's first score was for the Season 4 of the TV series Stay Lucky. He moved to Los Angeles in 1997 and scored his first major film, Face/Off. It was followed by Antz in 1998, the first film produced by DreamWorks Animation, which he co-scored with fellow British composer Harry Gregson-Williams, which also marked the duo's first score for an animated film. Two years later, Powell collaborated with composer Hans Zimmer on the score for The Road to El Dorado. Later that same year, he also teamed up with Harry Gregson-Williams again to compose the score to Chicken Run and then again the following year on Shrek. Gregson-Williams composed all the subsequent Shrek films and the sequel to Chicken Run himself. In 2001 he also scored Evolution, I Am Sam, Just Visiting and Rat Race.
In 2002 Powell was hired to score The Bourne Identity for director Doug Liman after Carter Burwell left the project. He also returned to score the series' other two films, The Bourne Supremacy and The Bourne Ultimatum, under British director Paul Greengrass.
Powell collaborated with Liman again to score Mr. & Mrs. Smith (2005). That year he also scored Robots for Blue Sky Studios, and went on to score many of the studio's subsequent films until 2017's Ferdinand.
In 2006, he scored Greengrass' United 93. He also composed music for his second Blue Sky film Ice Age: The Meltdown, following David Newman, who scored the first Ice Age film; as well as X-Men: The Last Stand and Happy Feet, for which he won a Film & TV Music Award for Best Score for an Animated Feature Film. The next year he scored The Bourne Ultimatum. In 2008 he reunited with Hans Zimmer and returned to DreamWorks Animation to score Kung Fu Panda, and also wrote music for Jumper, Dr. Seuss' Horton Hears a Who!, Hancock, and Bolt. In 2009 he scored the third film of Ice Age series; Dawn of the Dinosaurs.
In 2010, Powell composed the score to How to Train Your Dragon, which earned him a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Original Score. It was his sixth DreamWorks Animation film, although the first where he composed the whole score himself. That year he also scored Greengrass's Green Zone and Knight and Day.
In 2013, Powell took a sabbatical year from film scoring. In April 2014, after completing his scores to sequels Rio 2 and How to Train Your Dragon 2, he announced he would take another break to compose concert music, including a 45-minute oratorio to commemorate the 100-year anniversary of World War I. The piece, "A Prussian Requiem", with a libretto by Michael Petry, premiered on 6 March 2016 at The Royal Festival Hall, London with José Serebrier conducting the Philharmonia Orchestra.
Powell composed the score for Solo: A Star Wars Story (2018), collaborating with John Williams, who wrote Han Solo's theme. In 2019, Powell scored How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World, the final film in the How to Train Your Dragon series. In January 2024, it was announced that Powell will return to compose the score for the live-action remake of How to Train Your Dragon. In August 2024, it was confirmed that Powell will compose and conduct the incidental score for the two-part film adaptation of Wicked, in collaboration with the musical's composer Stephen Schwartz.