Brad Bird Explains Why ‘Ray Gunn’ Took Decades To Reach Screens

Hollywood has no shortage of passion projects that spend years in limbo, but few have waited as long as Brad Bird’s ‘Ray Gunn’. The animated sci-fi noir has been on the filmmaker’s mind since before his feature debut, and it’s finally arriving in theaters and on Netflix this December. Its journey says a lot about how the industry treats original animation.

Bird is no stranger to defying expectations. He directed ‘The Iron Giant’, ‘The Incredibles’ and ‘Ratatouille’, and ‘Ray Gunn’ is his first animated feature as director since ‘Incredibles 2’ in 2018. Yet even with that track record, the project spent decades without a home.

Now Bird has explained why in an exclusive with Empire. He told the magazine that the film took more than 30 years to make because people were frightened by it, and that financiers kept asking where the cute, cuddly animals were. In other words, studios saw a stylish sci-fi noir with adult sensibilities and didn’t know where it fit in a market built around family-friendly animation.

That account matches what Bird has said elsewhere. The film was intended to mark his directorial debut roughly 30 years ago, but Turner Feature Animation and Warner Bros. rejected it as too risky and too adult, according to Gold Derby. Bird then pivoted to ‘The Iron Giant’, which was released in 1999.

Bird has also pushed back on the idea that he spent three decades working on it, telling Deadline that he gave it up and expected it to be shelved like so many ideas. It stayed with him anyway, because the only way to see it was to make it. The turning point came when Skydance Animation signed him to direct it in 2021, with John Lasseter among the producers.

Welcome to the future. From the director of The Incredibles and Ratatouille comes RAY GUNN, starring Sam Rockwell, Scarlett Johansson, and Tom Waits. In select theaters December 4 and on Netflix December 18. https://t.co/4r2rtjCC8v

— Netflix (@netflix) September 23, 2026

The spark was a happy accident. Bird misheard the B-52’s song ‘Planet Claire’ as a cover of Henry Mancini’s theme from ‘Peter Gunn’, and the mix-up led him to picture a detective in a science fiction setting. That became Ray Gunn, a pun on the old-fashioned raygun.

The finished film is set in Metropia, a city of mile-high buildings imagined as a future derived from the world of 1939. Sam Rockwell voices Raymond Gunn, the last human private detective, who gets pulled into a case involving aliens, murder, and a multimedia star named Venus Nova, voiced by Scarlett Johansson. Tom Waits voices Eyera, Ray’s one-eyed alien confidant, and the cast also includes Alan Tudyk, Matt Berry, Bobby Cannavale and Patton Oswalt.

Early reactions have been warm. ‘Ray Gunn’ had its world premiere at the BFI London Film Festival on October 10, and TheWrap called it a dazzling animated noir that was worth the wait, praising its mix of action, comedy and melancholy. The review compared its blend of daytime noir, fast-talking dialogue and intricate futurism to classics like ‘Chinatown’ and ‘Blade Runner’.

The film opens in select theaters on December 4, including a limited run on 70mm screens, then arrives on Netflix on December 18. Bird wanted a PG-13 rating, but Netflix reportedly insisted on PG so it could appear on the platform’s Kids tab. It was written by Bird and Matthew Robbins from Bird’s original story.

For a project that nobody wanted to finance for so long, it’s a remarkable turnaround. Bird has joked that he isn’t up for another three-decade effort, so don’t expect a Gunn-verse anytime soon.

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