In 2009, he joined Zimmer and composer James Newton Howard in taking home the Grammy Award for Best Score Soundtrack for Visual Media for their work on director Christopher Nolan's Batman sequel The Dark Knight. However, it was his collaboration with Zimmer on the music for the 2010 animated film Megamind that helped launch his solo composing career. From there, he moved into video games, composing Crysis 2, Skylanders, and Assassin's Creed: Revelations with Jesper Kyd.

Although he continues to work with Zimmer, Balfe is an in-demand composer in his own right, and has supplied the scores for such high-profile productions as 2013's biopic Salinger, 2014's animated Penguins of Madagascar, and 2015's Terminator Genysis. In 2017 he composed the music for The Lego Batman Movie. Also that year, he was score producer on the war drama Dunkirk, and earned an Emmy nomination for Outstanding Main Title Theme for his collaboration with Zimmer on the National Geographic Channel's Albert Einstein series Genius. ~ Matt Collar, Rovi