Logan may be the third installment in Hugh Jackman’s trilogy as Wolverine, but besides Jackman and director James Mangold, the sequel does not appear to share many qualities with its predecessors. Mangold’s latest will be rated R, as opposed to the PG-13-rated The Wolverine, and resembles a violent western more than a youth-friendly traditional comic book movie. It will also focus more on character drama than action. Another notable difference in Logan was going to come from composer Cliff Martinez (Drive), who was tasked with crafting Logan’s musical score.

Mangold recently revealed, somewhat surprisingly, that a change has been made in the music department for Logan with mere months left before its wide release. A "random interaction" with "a fan" on social media led Mangold to reveal that Martinez has been replaced with a more familiar colleague who has worked on his movies in the past - including The Wolverine.

Veteran Marco Beltrami has been tabbed as the new composer for Logan, according to Mangold’s Twitter account. The fan, "Jeff" (who went by the Twitter handle @marco_beltrami) expressed his disappointment to Mangold on Twitter on Thursday for not employing Beltrami’s services for Logan, saying the composer would have “been in his element” scoring the third Wolverine movie. Mangold apparently agrees with that sentiment, as he surprised the fan by responding that he saw Beltrami working on the score on Saturday. The fan called for a truce with the apparently miffed Mangold, who confirmed Beltrami’s involvement and scolded the “accusations” and “pointless shame” of the fan.

Clearly, both Mangold and the random Twitter fan, are taking Beltrami’s work on the Logan musical score seriously. He scored Mangold’s The Wolverine and 3:10 to Yuma, the latter of which earned him an Oscar nomination. He is a veteran of 20-plus years, scoring many action and sci-fi productions, and credited with composing work for Snowpiercer, The Hurt Locker, Hellboy, Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines, and Blade II.

Beltrami’s addition is obviously a welcome one for Mangold, and the composer clearly has his share of big fans. The music in The Wolverine was as much of an improvement over X-Men Origins: Wolverine as any other aspect of the sequel; fans of the score in that movie (and Beltrami’s other work) have good reason to be excited for the late addition of Beltrami to the crew. Logan is also far from the first R-rated picture scored by Beltrami, who also did the music for the recent remakes of The Thing and Carrie, as well as all four Scream movies.

Of course, there could also be a reason to be concerned about Mangold suddenly replacing Martinez, who is still listed as the composer for Logan on IMDB, fairly late in production. Beltrami will be working on a limited time frame as the crew works to get the new score for Logan done in time for its March 3 release date. Beltrami has also scored his share of flops, such as the newest Fantastic Four reboot and Jonah Hex, though of course, he's not to blame for their quality. The composer has done enough similar movies to Logan that he can reasonably be relied upon to deliver a score that is at least serviceable, with the potential to be award-worthy.

Source: James Mangold