Ray Gunn trailer: Brad Bird chased this movie for 30 years — Netflix set the release date, with a theatrical run first
The Incredibles director's white whale finally surfaced this week, and it's getting the kind of theatrical treatment animated films almost never see.
Some passion projects die in a drawer. Brad Bird's outlived the drawer, the studio that owned the drawer, and half the industry around it. Ray Gunn — the retro-futuristic animated noir Bird first cooked up in the mid-'90s, before The Iron Giant even existed — got its first trailer on Wednesday, along with a real rollout: select theaters December 4, including 70mm engagements, then Netflix on December 18.
Read that again: a 70mm print run. For an animated film. That's a flex studios reserve for Nolan movies, and it signals exactly how hard Skydance Animation and Netflix intend to push this into the awards conversation — they're already submitting Scarlett Johansson's song "Too Much To Ask" for Oscar consideration, and the film's two London Film Festival screenings in October sold out fast.
What thirty years buys you
The movie is set in Metropia, a colossal city in an alternate future as imagined from 1939, where humans and aliens share the skyline and private eye Raymond Gunn gets pulled into a murder case orbiting a multimedia star named Venus Nova. Bird has been pitching the concept the same way for decades — as he puts it:
"it's Maltese Falcon meets Buck Rogers."
The vitals, for the record:
- Voice cast: Sam Rockwell as Gunn, Scarlett Johansson as Venus Nova, plus Tom Waits, Matt Berry, Bobby Cannavale, Alan Tudyk, Patton Oswalt, Michael Chernus — and Bird himself.
- Behind the mic: Bird directs and co-wrote with Matthew Robbins; Michael Giacchino scores; John Lasseter produces at Skydance Animation, with Cinesite animating.
- The scale: a budget north of $150 million and a 119-minute runtime — adult-skewing animation at a size nobody greenlights anymore.
- The gap: it's Bird's first feature of any kind since Incredibles 2 in 2018, and his first animated original since... well, since Ray Gunn was a stack of drawings at Turner Feature Animation in the '90s, where the project first stalled.
The co-star endorsement tour
Johansson, who has spent recent years alternating blockbusters and prestige, is doing neither modesty nor bit here — in the press notes she says flatly:
"Having the opportunity to collaborate with Brad Bird is a career milestone for me."
Funny timing, too: the winter calendar turned into a retrofuture pile-up, with Blade Runner 2099 hitting Prime Video November 25, Ray Gunn landing in December, and Apple's Neuromancer following January 22. Somebody in Hollywood clearly re-read their pulp paperbacks during the strikes.
Tickets for the 70mm runs aren't on sale yet; based on the LFF stampede, don't dawdle when they are.
Previously we wrote: Rings of Power season 4 release date: why 2028 is the year to circle — before season 3 has even aired
