Film Composers Take the Stage at Deadline's Sound & Screen Film 2026
A live orchestra is playing along to films from this season, and the composers who wrote the music are on stage to talk about it. Deadline's Sound & Screen: Film 2026 opened on Friday, 6 November, at UCLA's Royce Hall in Los Angeles.
The evening mixes film clips, live music and panel talks. Opening remarks were scheduled for 6:30 p.m. Pacific time, according to Deadline's 2026 lineup. A film score is the original music written for a movie, and the panels give the people who wrote it a chance to explain how they did it.
Two names drew attention on the programme. David Byrne and Daniel Pemberton appeared together with their work from Alex Gibney's documentary Musk, which is listed under Bleecker Street. Pemberton also spoke about his score for Project Hail Mary, a film listed under Amazon MGM Studios.
The songs got their own moments. Diane Warren presented "One Right Here" from Maserati: The Brothers, a sports biopic listed under Magenta Light Studios. Linda Perry presented "What Lies With You" from her documentary Linda Perry: Let It Die Here. Marcus Bellringer Bell was listed with "Walk With Kings," an original song from The Greatest, a docuseries about Muhammad Ali on Prime Video.
Other films on the lineup carried their own musical stories. Hope, a South Korean science fiction thriller, is listed under Neon with a score by Michael Abels. Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother, which stars Mahershala Ali, is listed under Orion Pictures and Amazon MGM Studios, with music by the trio Son Lux: Ryan Lott, Rafiq Bhatia and Ian Chang.
Several more titles were on the bill. Swapped, listed under Skydance Animation and Netflix, carries music by Siddhartha Khosla. Francesco Le Metre wrote the score for Being Heumann, directed by Sian Heder. Norwegian composer Rebekka Karijord wrote the score for Tenzing, a film about Everest. Kris Bowers, the composer for The Eyes of Ghana, was also presented.
For readers who follow the film calendar, the event sits at the start of a busy stretch. Composers and songwriters are often named in awards conversations, and a live showing with an orchestra gives audiences a different way to hear a film. The 2025 Sound & Screen: Film showcase had 12 films, and this year's lineup spans studios and streamers from Amazon, Netflix, Prime Video and others.
What stands out in the lineup is how many of the titles come from different companies. A single evening put a documentary from an independent distributor beside a streaming series and a studio release. Each of those films had its own path from script to screen, and the composers on stage were part of every one of them.
Deadline also ran a separate Sound & Screen: Television event earlier in the year, held at the same Royce Hall venue, which listed Christopher Lennertz for The Boys under Prime Video. The film edition now follows the same format of live music, clips and conversation, with the composers and songwriters doing most of the talking.
