Tyler credits the experience with inspiring his best work and is now focused on his ambitious electronic show Are We Dreaming.
When Brian Tyler set out to compose the music for The Super Mario Galaxy Movie soundtrack in August of last year, his work came to a screeching halt after experiencing a double brain hemorrhage. Still, his medical experience couldn't keep him from doing what he loves most.
"Nothing was gonna stop me, not even a hospital visit," Tyler, 53, who's scored over 100 films, including Avengers: Age of Ultron, Iron Man 3 and Crazy Rich Asians, tells PEOPLE exclusively.
Tyler -- who also scored 2023's The Super Mario Bros. Movie -- had just finished watching a screening for the movie and he was brainstorming ideas. Then, he walked up to one of his team members to discuss his ideas when he felt "a thunderclap."
"It basically feels like thunder. I had no reference for this and I'm an active person," he says, adding that he played plenty of sports growing up and never got hurt. "This thing hit me and it was gnarly."
According to the Cleveland Clinic, brain hemorrhages -- also known as brain bleeds -- can be life-threatening and cause permanent brain damage.
"It was scary going in there. You're facing your own mortality," he says, referencing a song of his called "Gates of Time."
"When I came out of it, someone said, 'You just had your 'Gates of Time' experience.' Because 'Gates of Time' is about what would happen if we faced our own mortality, and we were on the last day of our life called Day Zero... So now I was like, 'Oh my gosh, I was at day zero.' And I got pulled back. It was a miracle."
But the biggest miracle, he says, was that he was quickly able to bounce back to conducting, drumming and playing basketball. His doctors also reminded him how lucky he was to be alive.
"Afterwards, this is the analogy [I got], if my brain was Manhattan and it got hit with two nukes, there's all the smoke and everything. Then the neurologist goes in after the dust settles... and no windows were broken. They're like, 'That's how lucky you are.' So now I'm thinking, 'Wow, I have this time. Now, what am I gonna do with it?'"
Tyler then did what came naturally to him: he started writing for The Super Mario Galaxy Movie and the 2025 film Nuremberg from his hospital bed four days post-hemorrhage -- and it quickly became his "best work."
"I didn't have a piano or anything. Thank goodness I write music in my head," he says. "And everyone in the hospital is sitting around going, 'What is up with this guy?' But I was like, 'I'm determined.'"
Shortly after he was released from the hospital, Tyler went straight to conducting and recording the music, and he didn't tell anyone until he was nearly done with the soundtracks.
"I just didn't want people to worry," he says, adding, "I'm healthier now than I was before it happened. I'd be crazy not to take advantage of this."
In the end, The Super Mario Galaxy Movie became the highest-grossing film of 2026, and Tyler has adopted an everything-happens-for-a-reason mentality around his medical scare.
"I'm like, wait a minute, if I was driven to write the best music I could because of what happened in a way, because I was writing it from a bed, who knows the serendipity of things," he says. "It's like a crowning moment in my film composing career."
Now, Tyler -- who performed at the Formula 1 Crypto.com Miami Grand Prix on Saturday, May 2 -- is working on the "most ambitious thing I've ever done," an electronic show called Are We Dreaming that will feature visuals matching his sound-to-color synesthesia.
"It's almost like this is the first show where that is invisible to me because I make it congruent. So we switched roles. You see the world as I see it, and I see the world as you see it. It is absolutely wild," he says. "I'm so proud of it and it's really my life's work."