Brad Bird's Ray Gunn: Everything We Learned About The Netflix Movie

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After the Cinderella story of the meteoric rise of "KPop Demon Hunters" last year, Netflix Animation is bringing audiences one of the most highly anticipated films of 2026, Brad Bird's "Ray Gunn." Bird has consistently proven himself to be one of the best directors currently working regardless of medium, but his contributions to the world of animation cannot be overstated. "The Iron Giant," "The Incredibles," "The Incredibles 2," and "Ratatouille" could all be classified as masterpieces depending on who you ask, so the buzz surrounding "Ray Gunn" is already off the charts. Even from just the first look alone, "Ray Gunn" looks like everything we've always wanted.

But "Ray Gunn" had a long road to get to Netflix. Bird first conceived the idea with writer/director Matthew Robbins in the early 1990s, but struggled to secure studio backing because the animated feature was targeting a more mature audience. "Ray Gunn" is also famously the project that Pixar Animation rejected in favor of what would become "The Incredibles," which remains one of the biggest success stories in the studio's history.

Fortunately, thanks to the green light from John Lasseter's Skydance Animation and Netflix, "Ray Gunn" is heading our way later this year. A sci-fi-infused, neo-noir action flick, "Ray Gunn" stars Sam Rockwell as Raymond "Ray" Gunn, a small-time private eye detective tasked with investigating a femme fatale pop starlet named Venus Nova (Scarlett Johansson). Along with his one-eyed extraterrestrial partner named Eyera (Tom Waits), Ray Gunn must get to the bottom of the case in this retrofuturistic world of laser blasters, flying cars, and the time-honored tradition of organized crime.

I was recently invited to an advance press day for the film, and here are five things that have me even more excited for "Ray Gunn."

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Brad Bird conceived "Ray Gunn" roughly 30 years ago, but as he told us during our roundtable interview, the movie is, for the most part, as he envisioned it from the beginning. He tells us that while small things like rewriting dialogue obviously changed, as is customary for all films ("I can't think of one that I've done that didn't change until the final mix was shipped"), "Ray Gunn" is otherwise fundamentally the same story he had all those years ago. "The stuff that people are going to think is really current, it was in there a long time ago," he explained. "It just was either ahead of its time or pessimistic about where we were headed."

When asked to give a number to how much he felt changed over time, he said: "25%, maybe," but that the story and the characters are how he envisioned them from the start. Considering the explosion of popularity that retrofuturism has had in recent years thanks to shows like "Fallout," "For All Mankind," "Hello Tomorrow!" and "Severance," it's a major selling point that "Ray Gunn" has held true to Bird's longstanding vision and hasn't been reworked to capitalize off of one of TV's hottest current trends. And while we're on the topic of retrofuturism...

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During our roundtable interview, I asked Brad Bird whether the explosion of retrofuturism in mainstream culture had any impact on the film's look. He explained that one of the things "that's weird" is how frequently he watched other films incorporate a retrofuturistic element in a way that he thought "Ray Gunn" would do first — time and time again over the last three decades. "Everybody's going to think I'm copying these other things," he joked. "In fact, we were doing it first if somebody had backed it back then, but I didn't see a reason to change it just because someone else has used it in another way."

But sitting on the film for 30 years and trying to get it made doesn't mean that Bird had been tinkering with it and making changes this whole time, so the influence of other explorations of retrofuturism doesn't really exist. As he explained:

"I put it away, accepting the reality that they weren't going to make it then. But an opportunity arose where somebody said, 'We'd really like to make a film with you.' I'd go, 'Actually, you own a film of mine, an idea that I still want to make.' And they'd go, 'We do?' Because management had changed 10 times or whatever. So that's what eventually led to it getting made: And when it got made, I took the thing out of the 'Raiders of the Lost Ark' ending warehouse and opened the crate."

The result is a world with buildings that look like Hugh Ferriss by way of Googie architecture, weapons that blend midcentury modern aesthetics with advanced technology, and the signature cinematic language of noir cinema blending with science-fiction.

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Brad Bird has brought frequent collaborator Michael Giacchino back again to provide the score for "Ray Gunn," to ensure the film's emotional arc hits all the right notes. "The amount of power composers have that late in the process is mind-numbingly scary," Bird joked. "The thing is that he rebuilds it into a much stronger, much healthier being than I could have ever imagined, but it's always right at the end." Fortunately, Giacchino is a chameleon and a storyteller in his own right ("Werewolf By Night" forever), and knows exactly what to bring to a Brad Bird movie.

"It's always the best. I mean, always the highlight of my years when I look, and I can see on my schedule that there's going to be a Brad Bird movie coming up," Giacchino revealed, recalling the first thing Bird ever said to him after he landed the job to score "The Incredibles" being, "Now listen, your music could ruin my movie." But Bird continued, explaining, "If you and I are not on the same page every step of the way, the audience is going to start thinking things we don't want them to think. They're going to start feeling things we don't want them to feel. So it is so important that you and I are clasping hands the entire process to make sure that this story is right. We're both telling the same story." 

Giacchino has held true to that ever since, saying, "I have always been attracted to projects where I could help tell the story." And from what we heard during the preview, these two have made magic once again.

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Most people know Kimbra from her featured performance on "Somebody That I Used to Know" by Gotye, but the New Zealand-based singer-songwriter has four ARIA Music Awards, two Grammy Awards, and seven New Zealand Music Awards. "A friend of mine who's a wonderful animator and was one of the animation supervisors on 'Ray Gunn' kept going, 'There's this artist named Kimbra. You got to hear Kimbra. You got to listen to Kimbra.' [...] And finally I listened to an album that she did, and it was great," Brad Bird said. "And when I realized that this thing was actually going to get funding, that we could go to her and have her write the Venus Nova songs."

Bird and Michael Giacchino met with Kimbra early on in production to discuss the type of pop songs they needed for Venus Nova, and said she met the challenge. "It was really interesting because I could be unbelievably specific," Bird tells us. "I could say, 'Okay, I want you to write an earworm, something that instantly becomes on your mind, but I want it to be slightly annoying, but it has to be instantly you find yourself singing it.' She just went, 'Okay, got it,' and came back and gave me this song that was, as she would call it, 'a banga.'"

While we only heard a tiny bit of Venus Nova's music, Bird and Giacchino are known for their taste, and I can't wait to hear more.

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The human characters of "Ray Gunn" look right at home in classic noir cinema because they are amalgamations modeled after real people. "You look at a lot of different faces, and you like certain qualities of different ones," Brad Bid explained. "There are weird little things, imperfections on ... If you have people mention the most beautiful actress or the handsomest guy or whatever, usually the visual reasons for that are their imperfections." For example, the titular Ray Gunn has very prominent eyebrows and a larger forehead than what looksmaxxing goons would consider an "acceptable" percentage, while Venus Nova is very clearly inspired by Lauren Bacall and Veronica Lake. As Bird explained:

"The mistake that people have traditionally made in animation is when they have a lead human character, they tend to idealize them to the point of blandness, and they're not interesting to look at [...] It's the things that are not perfect that make them interesting to look at. Ray's eyebrows are way big, and they're kind of like Montgomery Clift in his early films. But some other aspect of him — he's not the tallest guy. He's not any taller than Venus Nova. He might even be an inch shorter, and that's kind of like Lauren Bacall and Humphrey Bogart. And again, Lauren Bacall has all kinds of quirky things to her face. Bogart has even more. He's got a weird kind of lisp, and he shouldn't be a leading man, and yet he totally is. And so that's why movies are this mystery. [...] But there's no science to it. It's art."

"Ray Gunn" is set for release on Netflix on December 18, 2026.