At San Diego Comic-Con, director Brad Bird (The Incredibles, Ratatouille) revealed more about his newest animated film, Ray Gunn, and debuting the opening seven minutes of the upcoming Netflix release.
Bird was the subject of a spotlight My Cinematic Journey SDCC panel in Hall H, hosted by Collider EIC Steven Weintraub. Bird recounted how his elevator pitch for the film was “Buck Rogers meets The Maltese Falcon,” describing it as a film about “desperate characters in an alternate future.”
The opening scenes give us a look at the film’s setting, a futuristic city filled with giant, brilliantly lit towers and flying cars, but with an art deco/1930s vibe to it. It’s like if Coruscant was mashed together with Batman: The Animated Series’ Gotham City. We see flying cars with art deco design elements, and businessmen in suit and ties taking off into the air on jet packs, while holding old school briefcases by the handle. Jetpacks are omnipresent, including on construction workers, who use them to float about the building they’re working on.
The brunt of the footage focused on the lanky, one-eyed green alien known as Eyera (voiced by Tom Waits) paying someone off to get a janitor’s uniform to sneak into an office where it’s revealed his trash can actually contains the title character, Ray Gunn himself (Sam Rockwell). There are shadows aplenty in the noir-infused visuals of the square-jawed, sardonic hero Ray and his pal Eyera searching for secret files, only for a competing duo of aliens showing up to find them as well… and for all four to be interrupted by the large, hulking female alien whose office they’re breaking into.
It turns out this lady and Ray know each other, as her four extra arms are revealed during a furious fight that culminates in Ray saving himself by using a freeze ray device in her office to form solid ice around her head. But when Eyera tries to get them to run out of there before the cops arrive, Ray proves he’s got a good heart by not letting her suffocate, insisting they stay to smash open the ice first. It takes a bunch of very funny Looney Tunes-style bashes of her head back and forth to crack it open properly.
As he had when he spoke to IGN recently, Bird reiterated the very long journey to get Ray Gunn made, noting it had taken 30 years. “I would have happily made it a long time ago, but you need someone to pay for it,” Bird quipped. “I always liked it and always thought it would be a good movie.”
Bird stressed the importance of fully building out the film’s setting, Metropia, noting the movie takes place nearly entirely in this city, which he described as “sci-fi but very urban.” Bird and his animators worked to pack the frames with details. “You can let your eye drift and there will be something for it,” he said.
Ray Gunn is scored by Michael Giacchino, who has scored all of Bird’s movies since The Incredibles. Giachinno made a surprise appearance at the panel, noting he mixed many elements into the music, saying it included “’50s sci-fi, ’30s and ’40s noir, some slight jazz.”
He said that his big concern was that the score didn’t sound like The Incredibles, but stressed that he loves working with Bird because the director likes to switch things up “and takes a hard left turn with his stuff.”
Added Giachinno, “At its core, [Ray Gunn has] a very emotional score but it has a lot of action, a lot of fun, and hopefully is its own thing.”
Ray Gunn debuts on Netflix on December 18, 2026.
For more on Brad Bird at SDCC, see what he had to say about turning another movie he’s developed for decades — a live-action project `about the 1906 San Francisco earthquake — into a miniseries instead.
