The music of ‘The Super Mario Galaxy Movie’ is powered by a tale of survival
By Lisa Respers France, CNN
(CNN) — Brian Tyler remembers being in a hospital bed when the music for “The Super Mario Galaxy Movie” came to him.
While in his music studio in August 2025, the composer suffered a major medical incident: a double subarachnoid brain hemorrhage — bleeding in the space between the brain and the membrane covering it.
“It just happened out of nowhere,” said Tyler, 53, speaking from his home in Los Angeles. “It’s like lightning striking and I was touching the void, facing the blackness.”
Many people with such a hemorrhage die suddenly, according to Cleveland Clinic. Among those who make it to the hospital, one-third die while hospitalized. Another third survive with a disability.
Tyler said the cause of the hemorrhage wasn’t clear. He went on to spend three weeks in the hospital undergoing treatment.
Soon, he found himself beating the odds. He put pen to paper, continuing the movie compositions he had been working on when he suffered his aneurysm — for both “The Super Mario Galaxy Movie” and “Nuremberg,” which came out last year.
“It was like a cathartic kind of way to come back and it gave me a goal and a sense of where I was headed,” he said.
Now, with “The Super Mario Galaxy Movie” having garnered more than $747 million globally at the box office and on track to be one of the year’s highest grossing films, Tyler is feeling grateful.
He quipped that his score was responsible for “99%” of the film’s success. It may have been a joke but to many superfans of the film — a sequel to 2023’s hugely successful “Super Mario Bros.,” which Tyler also composed for — the music is a key component.
“The music is such an important part of Super Mario Bros. and I wrote it all as one piece,” Tyler said. “The goal was to write something beautiful, epic and really impassioned.”
Tyler has had a storied career, composing music for dozens of major films including “Rambo,” “Crazy Rich Asians” and “The Iron Man 3.” He has also composed the theme for the U.S. Open Golf Championships and Formula 1.
Tyler also worked on the music for “Nuremberg” in the wake of his massive medical emergency, the critically acclaimed 2025 film starring Rami Malek as a US Army psychiatrist who evaluates Nazi leaders including Hermann Göring, played by Russell Crowe, ahead of the post-WWII trials. “’Nuremberg’ was such an important film historically, and it needed to really capture that era of time,” Tyler said.
Tyler saw a thread between his own experience and the two films he worked on.
“It happens to be that there’s these parallel lines with the story where you’re rising up, you’re enduring and you’re searching in both movies,” he said. “So, for me, it was like I was able to really write music for the experience I was just in.”
At the moment, though, it’s all “Super Mario Galaxy” all the time. The film, directed by Aaron Horvath, Michael Jelenic, Pierre Leduc and Fabien Polack and starring Brie Larson and Jack Black among others, is based on the legendary Nintendo video game series.
A fan of video games himself, Tyler understood the importance of meshing tunes with the visuals in the animated film, which was informed by one of Tyler’s super powers: chromesthesia.
The neurological phenomenon causes those who have it to be able to see sound as colors and shapes, which Tyler said acts as “a cheat code” when he is conducting an orchestra because he is able “to see the coloration of chords.”
“It’s like an added kind of way to listen by seeing the music itself,” Tyler said. “When people talk there’s always colors. I’m just used to it. I thought everyone had it.”
He will soon be able to show people what that feels like. Tyler is directing a film he describes as “a modern day ‘Fantasia’ meets ‘2001: A Space Odyssey.’”
“I’m doing the visuals and the color timing and the music and filming it,” he said. “I’m making it so you can see what I see.”
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