Brad Bird has finally shown audiences the city he has been sketching for three decades. Netflix released a new trailer for Ray Gunn on November 12, and it drops viewers into Metropia, a retro-futuristic metropolis where people and aliens share the streets, cars fly and towers rise a mile into the sky.
Sam Rockwell voices Raymond Gunn, a private eye who feels out of date even in the future. Scarlett Johansson plays Venus Nova, a scandal-magnet megastar who pulls him into a murder case. Tom Waits voices Eye-Ra, Ray’s one-eyed alien partner. The film reaches theaters, including limited 70mm screenings, on December 4 and starts streaming on Netflix on December 18.
A pitch from the 1990s
Bird has described the project in one line. “The elevator pitch I came up with is The Maltese Falcon meets Buck Rogers,” he told Netflix’s Tudum site. He added that mixing the two genres gave him “a chance to play with a lot of very cinematic elements and extreme characters.”
That pitch is old. Bird’s own career history shows he wrote an early Ray Gunn script with Matthew Robbins and took it to Turner Feature Animation after signing there in January 1995. The studio judged the story too intense for young children. When Turner folded into Time Warner, executives passed on it again and steered him toward The Iron Giant instead.
Here is the long road in short form:
- 1995: Bird signs with Turner Feature Animation; Ray Gunn is judged too dark for its audience.
- 1996: Warner executives decline the project; Bird takes on The Iron Giant.
- 2004 to 2018: The Incredibles, Ratatouille, Ghost Protocol, Tomorrowland and Incredibles 2 come first.
- 2021: Bird signs with Skydance and rebuilds the film there, with Netflix later lined up as its home.
- December 2026: theaters on the 4th, Netflix on the 18th.
Counting from that 1995 Turner deal, the film arrives about 31 years after its first studio pitch. For context, that gap is longer than the entire run between Bird’s first feature in 1999 and today.
What the trailer shows
The new footage leans hard into Art Deco design: streamlined buildings, chrome, and a skyline that looks lifted from a 1930s pulp magazine cover. Netflix says much of the gumshoe work in this world is now handled by tiny “pry bots,” which makes Ray and Eye-Ra two of the last detectives still working cases on foot.
The tone is darker than a family cartoon. Bird names his touchstones: Humphrey Bogart’s detective films, the 1947 noir Out of the Past, and the private eyes Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe. “You’re being hopeful with the city, but you’re still showing there’s a dark underbelly — things that happen in the shadows,” he said.
Bird’s argument about animation
Bird has spent his career pushing back on the idea that animated films are a genre for kids. Ray Gunn is the clearest test of that argument yet: a noir murder mystery, a troubled celebrity and a burned-out hero, all drawn rather than filmed. “Animation is too fun a medium, and too interesting, to limit what kind of stories can be told,” he said.
The bet is also commercial. A studio-scale animated film made primarily for streaming, with a short theatrical window, is still unusual. Badiyaa has tracked a similar fight over where animated features end up, including how the shelved Coyote vs. Acme found its way into the Best Animated Feature Oscar race. More trailers and release news sit on our Entertainment page.
The 70mm prints are the detail film fans will chase. Netflix lists them as limited, so the first chance to see Metropia on a giant screen comes on December 4, two weeks before the film lands on the service.
Further reading
Image: The Conmunity – Pop Culture Geek, CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons
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