Netflix has set a December 18, 2026 release date for Brad Bird’s animated movie Ray Gunn, featuring Sam Rockwell, Scarlett Johansson and Tom Waits
Netflix has set a December 18, 2026 release date for Brad Bird’s animated movie Ray Gunn, featuring Sam Rockwell, Scarlett Johansson and Tom Waits in the voice cast.
The date was unveiled at the Annecy International Film Festival on Wednesday in the platform’s packed out Next on Netflix session in the 1,400-capacity Bonlieu theatre.
Set in Metropia, a gigantic city in an alternate future inhabited by aliens and humans as seen from a 1939 perspective, the film revolves around private eye Raymond Gunn (Rockwell) who is drawn into a case involving murder and a multimedia star named Venus Nova, voiced by Scarlett Johansson.
In a surprise treat for the Annecy audience, Aardmann co-founder Peter Lord took to the stage to interview Bird about the genesis and inspiration for the project. The session also showed a miniature clip of Gunn trying to procure a gun as well as the first seven minutes of the movie.
The latter showing Gunn as he attempts to steal compromising documents from a immense alien figure called Vanzina, and also introduced the futuristic retro setting and as well Gunn’s alien sidekick Eyera (Waits).
Oscar-winning The Incredibles and Ratatouille director Bird told Lord that the inspiration for the project had come years ago from “a goofy” misunderstanding, when he mistook the first few bars of the B52 track ‘Planet Claire’ for those of the theme tune by Henry Mancini for the Peter Gunn private eye series.
“Then I went no, no, it’s not Peter Gunn. What is it? It’s Ray Gunn. And then I went, that’s cool. This is the guy’s name, it’s retro, but it’s, you know, and it kind of fell together from there,” he said. “It’s film noir and a hard-boiled detective story, but it’s got a lot more comedy and a lot more action than the average film noir.”
Bird acknowledged that the film had taken a number of decades to bring to fruition but countered stories that he had been working on it for some 30 years.
“The word that’s starting to go out now is that I’ve worked on this for 30 years and obviously I have not. I did other things and it stayed in a filing cabinet at Warner Brothers but, you know, it was nicely preserved,” he said
“I got it in turnaround, which means before they owned it, even though they didn’t want to make… I negotiated to get it back and then I could go out and see if I could get financing for it elsewhere,” he recounted.
Ray Gunn- Venus Nova (Scarlett Johansson) and Raymond Gunn (Sam Rockwell)
Cr: Skydance Animation ©2026
Bird also touched on Rockwell, Johansson and Waits’s key contributions to the film.
“Voices are really important to animation because what takes an actor 10 seconds to say may take an animator a month to animate, the animator is going to listen to that line hundreds of times, if there’s nothing in the line, you can’t dig that deep on it but really good voice actors give you something that excites you,” he said.
In spite of their busy schedules, Bird managed to Rockwell and Johansson in the studio together for some of the sessions. “They had done Jojo Rabbit together… and I got Sam and Tom Waits together… I’m really happy with it. They did great work,” he said.
The movie is a Netflix and Skydance Animation Production, produced by John Lasseter, David Ellison, Dana Goldberg, and Lisa Beroud.
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