What with everything that's been going on over the past few weeks (holidays, birthdays, multiple viewings of Tom Hooper's Cats) your friendly neighborhood NIN correspondent has apparently not been paying close enough attention, which is why - a week and a half after the fact! - I am only just now becoming aware that BMD's favorite film-scoring duo have been hired to compose the score for David Fincher's Mank.
Sorry about that.
The news comes to us from a recent Revolver Magazine profile, which says...
"Director David Fincher — who first dragged Reznor and Ross into the film-scoring game by enlisting them for 2010's The Social Network — is currently shooting the film Mank, a biopic about Herman J. Mankiewicz, the screenwriter of Orson Welles' Citizen Kane, played by Gary Oldman. As such, the movie is set in 1940."
But wait - there's more:
"We're not gonna be using the modular synthesizer on that one," Reznor revealed. "We think we're gonna be period authentic, so it just creates a new set of challenges."
Given all the work Reznor and Ross have done with Fincher in the past, it's not terribly surprising to hear they've been hired on to Mank, but this thing about "period-authentic instrumentation" is very compelling, indeed. It won't be the only unusual score Reznor/Ross work on this year: they're also composing music for Pixar's Soul, which will reportedly find the pair working within the jazz genre (or, at minimum, creating music that'll compliment the songs jazz legend Jon Batiste is contributing to the soundtrack).
Like it says above, production is currently underway on Mank, with the film expected to hit Netflix sometime this year (we're guessing that one'll be an awards contender, so don't expect it until much, much later in 2020). Stay tuned for more on that one - as well as further news regarding Reznor/Ross' ongoing domination of the film score world - as further updates roll in.