Gladiator has the same theme as Pirates?

[Mojo Turbo]

It's more than this one part, if you watch Gladiator you will actually hear a few of the songs from Pirates... it's weird.

Here is another one

[Captain McCool]

Haha, well I'm glad I'm not the only one who noticed! I actually did a report on this in a music appreciation class a few years back. The report was regarding how various film composers have a tendency to borrow themes from their own previous film scores, as well as borrowing them from other composers (like John Williams did with Gustav Holst's "The Planets").

In this case though, the answer seems to be rather intriguing. See, it seems Klaus Badelt worked in Hans Zimmer's studio, directly under Zimmer. Rumor has it that when Badelt was doing the score for Curse of the Black Pearl he basically botched the job horribly, and Zimmer had to come in and save his arse. Zimmer composed the music for Gladiator (as well as half the other films in Hollywood in the last couple decades), so it only makes sense that he, while on a tight schedule and trying to clean up someone else's mess, would borrow from earlier works of his own to fill in the blanks. And then, as we all know, it was Hans Zimmer who composed the music for the REST of the Pirates films.

Mind you, this is all conjecture based on rumors, but it IS true that Badelt worked for Zimmer, and that Zimmer then picked up the roll for all subsequent PotC films. So it seems to fit.

Incidentally, that same theme has made its way all bloody over Hollywood - most notably in the form of film trailer music. You can even hear a variation of it as far back as the theatrical trailer for "The Mask of Zorro" in 1998. Check it out - at roughly 2:32 is when it picks up:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uczLtpWF_cY