Why the Oscars Banned Hans Zimmer's Dune: Part Two Score

Hans Zimmer won an Academy Award for "Dune" in 2022. Three years later, his score for "Dune: Part Two" — a film Denis Villeneuve calls the second half of one continuous story — wasn't just passed over. It never got the chance to compete at all. The Academy's music branch ruled it ineligible before nominations even opened, over a rule most moviegoers have never heard of and that has quietly knocked out some of the most acclaimed scores of the last two decades.

The rule lives in the Academy's eligibility guidelines for Best Original Score, and it targets exactly what it sounds like: recycled music. A score can be disqualified if it's "diluted by use of tracked themes or other pre-existing music, diminished in impact by the predominant use of songs, or assembled from the music of more than one composer." For sequels specifically, the Academy caps how much of a returning composer's earlier themes can carry over: no more than 20% pre-existing material from previous entries in the franchise. Zimmer's "Dune: Part Two" score leaned on the themes he'd already written for "Dune" past that threshold, and the film branch ruled it out.

Zimmer didn't accept the framing that his score was a rehash. "It's called 'Dune: Part Two,' not 'Dune 2,'" he said. "The story starts the second we finish the first movie. We are still within that story, those characters, and it would be foolish and completely uncinematic to go and write new themes for the characters instead of enlarging the theme." Villeneuve went further, telling Variety he didn't consider the matter settled: "I don't think this is over yet." He argued Zimmer had written a "tremendous amount of music" for the sequel and called it "one of the most beautiful scores Hans has ever written."

The Academy's own appeal didn't move, and "Dune: Part Two" isn't an outlier. The rule has claimed scores from composers with far less commercial cover than Zimmer. In 2008, "The Dark Knight" was disqualified after the Academy's music branch spent four hours across two meetings debating a technicality: the film's cue sheet listed five composer credits, and more than 60% but less than 70% of the score was attributed to Zimmer and James Newton Howard, with the rest split among music editor Alex Gibson, ambient designer Mel Wesson and composer Lorne Balfe — enough shared credit to trip the "more than one composer" clause. The same pairing had already lost "Batman Begins" to an identical ruling.

Antonio Sanchez's percussion score for "Birdman" ran into the same rule from the opposite direction in 2014. His drumming made up more than half the film's music, but roughly 17 minutes of classical cues by Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninov — used as source music inside the story, not written by Sanchez — were enough for the Academy to call the score "diluted." Director Alejandro González Iñárritu appealed personally, arguing the drums were "the heartbeat of these actors" and that the film "would not be the same without Antonio's drums." Academy Music Branch Executive Committee chair Charles Fox rejected the appeal on an "overwhelming" vote, while writing that the decision had nothing to do with the quality of Sanchez's work, which he called "superb."

What connects Zimmer, Sanchez and the "Dark Knight" team is that none of them lost on merit. Each got knocked out by a paperwork threshold — a percentage of pre-existing themes, a count of names on a cue sheet — decided months before any Academy member cast a ballot. The rule exists to keep the category honest, protecting composers who write a film's music from scratch against those who lean on songs, samples or a predecessor's melodies and call it new. But it also means the branch, not the voters, quietly picks who's even allowed to be judged, and a score can be one of the best-reviewed of its year without ever getting the chance to find out.