Michael Giacchino

Born in Riverside Township, New Jersey on 10 October 1967, Michael Giacchino was obsessed with the cinema as a child, recording movies on an audio cassette tape and listening back to them late at night. He also spent his childhood making animated films with their own accompanying soundtracks, before combining his two loves by studying film production at New York's School of Visual Arts and music at the Julliard School. Gradually working his way through the ranks at Universal and then Disney, he started making music for video games and got his big break when Steven Spielberg allowed him to use a live orchestra on the games The Lost World: Jurassic Park (1997) and the Medal of Honor series. It eventually led to him working with director J.J. Abrams on the soundtrack to the television series Alias in 2001, and from there he produced the music to the hit show Lost. He collaborated once more with Abrams on his TV series Fringe in 2008, for which he composed the music to the pilot episode before handing the reins to Chad Seiter. In 2005, he worked with Randy Newman in creating the score to the animated film The Incredibles. His work for Disney-Pixar also includes soundtracks to Ratatouille (2007), Up (2009), Cars 2 (2011), Inside Out (2015), Zootropolis (2016) and Incredibles 2 (2018), whilst his relationship with J.J. Abrams saw them collaborate on Mission: Impossible III (2006), Super 8 (2011) and Star Trek (2009). Renowned for his traditional use of live orchestras, his scores are acclaimed for rekindling the feel of classic cinema and heightening the emotional highs in poignant scenes, and he went on to win an Emmy, three Grammys, an Academy Award and a Golden Globe. He has also worked on major movies such as Spider-Man: Homecoming (2017), its sequel Spider-Man: Far from Home (2019), the rebooted Planet of the Apes trilogy, Jurassic World (2016), Rogue One (2016), and The Batman (2022), and in 2025 worked on the film score for Marvel's The Fantastic Four: First Steps.