Ray Gunn: Brad Bird’s science-fiction detective story arrives on Netflix on 18 December

The facts

On 23 September 2026, Netflix released the first trailer for Ray Gunn, Brad Bird’s new animated film. It will be available on the platform on 18 December, a date already announced in June at the Annecy festival. New this week: the film will first open in a selection of cinemas on 4 December, with a limited number of screenings in 70 mm.

In France: no cinema release has been announced; according to AlloCiné, the limited release applies outside France, and Ray Gunn will be available directly on Netflix on 18 December.

The story takes place in Metropia, a giant city where humans and aliens live side by side, in the future as it was imagined in 1939, with buildings a mile high (1.6 km). Raymond Gunn is one of the last private detectives still pounding the pavement there, now that small robot investigators do most of the work. He finds himself caught up in a murder case involving Venus Nova, a star as famous as she is controversial.

Sam Rockwell voices Gunn, Scarlett Johansson Venus Nova and Tom Waits Eye-Ra, the detective’s one-eyed alien partner. The same day, Netflix announced a dozen other voice actors, including Alan Tudyk, Matt Berry, Bobby Cannavale, Michelle Rodriguez, Patton Oswalt and John Ratzenberger. The film is a Netflix and Skydance Animation production.

The context

Brad Bird directed The Iron Giant (1999), The Incredibles (2004) and Ratatouille (2007), the last two of which won Oscars. The idea for Ray Gunn came to him from a mix-up, he explained at Annecy in June: he had mistaken the intro of “Planet Claire”, by the B-52’s, for the theme to the crime series Peter Gunn. Hence the hero’s name, a pun on ray gun, the classic weapon of old-school science fiction.

Co-written with Matthew Robbins in the early 1990s, the script then spent years in a Warner Bros. filing cabinet, before Bird negotiated to regain control of it. He also disputes the idea that he spent thirty years working on it: “I haven’t been stewing about it for 30 years,” he told DiscussingFilm, explaining that he had long believed it abandoned; he directed plenty of other films in the meantime.

Why it matters

Bird sums up his film in one line: “The Maltese Falcon meets Buck Rogers”, in other words the detective film noir crossed with old-fashioned space adventure. “Animation is too fun a medium, and too interesting, to limit what kind of stories can be told,” he told Netflix Tudum. Netflix, for its part, is giving him a cinema release before the film goes online, and in 70 mm for some screenings, outside France.

Archive note

• On Netflix on 18 December 2026, including in France; outside France, a limited cinema release (including 70 mm screenings) from 4 December.
• Voices by Sam Rockwell, Scarlett Johansson and Tom Waits; produced by Netflix and Skydance Animation.
• Written by Brad Bird and Matthew Robbins, the script long remained at Warner Bros.