The beauty of a main title is that you establish your main theme and maybe a bit of your secondary theme. You plant the seed that you’re going to go water later in the score. And so, having that removed just made it so much more difficult.

Elfman is describing the compositional function of a film’s main title: it is a privileged musical space where a composer can state the primary theme (and hint at secondary material) in a clear, memorable form before the narrative begins. That opening “plants the seed” for later development—recurrence, variation, orchestration changes, and emotional recontextualization across the score. If a production removes or minimizes the main-title sequence, the composer loses a key structural and rhetorical tool for thematic establishment, making it harder to unify the score and to ensure the audience internalizes the musical ideas that will return later.