With a considerable number of scores created for popular mega-franchises and single release blockbusters written over the past few decades, film composer Hans Zimmer has become one of the most prolific and influential figures in today's film music industry. So extensive has been Zimmer's impact that many of his scores have been featured and closely scrutinized in several recent publications within film music scholarship, including two entries in the Music in Epic Film essay collection published in this past year (ed., Meyer 2017), all largely geared towards answering the following questions: What is it about Zimmer's sound-style that so completely captures his audiences' attention? How is he able to time-and-time again forge and design a successfully immersive soundscape quite distinctive from all other composers? These and other such queries have already been addressed by noted scholars such as Lehman (2017), Tillman (2017), Hexel (2016), and Dreyfus (2013).

This paper, instead, brings attention to defining and characterizing certain musical features which encompass the current "epic" soundtrack. What makes certain film scores sound "epic"? Do the plot lines of these films hold any influence, and if so, how are they reflected in the soundtrack? Can "epic-ness" be defined by a certain harmonic progression or melodic sequence, or is it something more complex, nuanced, and subjective? Additionally, this paper continues with the assertion that Zimmer's works have had a powerful influence on what has come to exemplify a dominant attribute of "epic" Hollywood film scores: musical monumentality.