May 5, 2021
ESCAPE ROOM 2 Coming Up With Score by Brian Tyler & John Carey
– by Randall D. Larson
Brian Tyler and John Carey have returned to compose the score for the upcoming horror sequel ESCAPE ROOM 2. Directed by Adam Robitel (INSIDIOUS: THE LAST KEY, THE TAKING OF DEBORAH LOGAN), stars Taylor Russell and Logan Miller from the 2019 film are joined by Isabelle Fuhrman, Thomas Cocquerel, and Holland Roden for the new movie.
The sequel film was in development as early as April 2019, according to an October 2019 article in Collider. The original film grossed an impressive $155 million worldwide on a reported production budget of just $9 million, according to Collider, so it was all but guaranteed that Sony would fast-track a sequel into production.
In an interview with Fred Topel of Bloody Disgusting, also in April 2019, Robitel stated that “one of the challenges the production team faced in its development was to figure out how to design new escape rooms that would outdo those the original film featured. He intended the first film’s final scene, which depicted an escape room disguised as a hijacked airplane, to suggest that Minos, the organization behind the deadly escape rooms, may be more powerful, sinister and given to surveilling than previously thought, which he planned to expand upon in the sequel.”
Discussing his and Carey’s score for the first ESCAPE ROOM in an interview for Soundtrax in January, 2019, composer Brian Tyler described their approach to scoring the first film: “There are these moments of suspense and revelation in the movie, and the thing that I really wanted to work with was the idea of time and tempo and pitch. The tempos in this score accelerate and decelerate a lot. The ticking clock is not steady – it often speeds up and so the tempo and chord changes in the music speed up as well. I felt that there would be an unbalance to the score if I could manipulate the pitch, even within a single cue. All of a sudden the pitch starts falling, and the whole cue starts de-tuning. That does a very weird thing to your brain because if you‘re bending between the notes on a piano, in between quarter notes or even bending the whole cue in between keys, up and down, it gives you a sense of unbalance. It was a way to create a sense of disarray and panic.”
I can not escape being eager to seeing how Tyler and Carey approach scoring the new film! After numerous scheduled release dates were changed multiple times, from April 2020 all the way to January 2022, ESCAPE ROOM 2 is now set to be released in theaters nationwide on July 16, 2021 by Sony Pictures. – rdl
