Credit : Netflix's X
LOS ANGELES, November 12, 2026 – Netflix has released a new trailer for Ray Gunn, the long-planned animated feature from two-time Academy Award-winning director Brad Bird, and confirmed that the film will open in select theatres, including limited 70mm engagements, on December 4, 2026, before arriving worldwide on the streaming service on December 18.
Writing on X on Thursday, the company described the film as coming from the director of The Incredibles and Ratatouille and promised “a new world, a mystery to crack, and a whole lot of suspects”. The trailer accompanies an official Netflix Tudum briefing published the same day, in which Bird and the studio set out the story’s retrofuturistic setting and the principal voice cast.
The film is set in Metropia, a towering city of the future in which humans and aliens live side by side, flying cars fill the skies and Art Deco-inspired towers rise a mile high. Beneath that gloss, Tudum says, the story turns on murder, corruption and a detective struggling to keep pace with a changing world. Sam Rockwell voices Raymond Gunn, a private investigator who already seems out of his time, even in this imagined future. Much of a detective’s routine work is now done by tiny “pry bots”, leaving Ray and his cyclopean alien partner, Eye-Ra, voiced by Tom Waits, among the last investigators still working the streets in the old-fashioned way.
Into that orbit comes Venus Nova, voiced by Scarlett Johansson, one of Metropia’s biggest and most controversial megastars. Scandal, the studio says, follows her wherever she goes. Ray is soon drawn through her circle of hangers-on, moving between the city’s glamorous heights and its seamy underworld. Bird has said the film tries to remain hopeful about the city while still showing “a dark underbelly — things that happen in the shadows”.
The director has described the project as a blend of classic 1940s detective pictures and science-fiction adventure. “The elevator pitch I came up with is The Maltese Falcon meets Buck Rogers,” he told Tudum. He has also pointed to the Bogart detective films, the noir classic Out of the Past, and the worlds of Philip Marlowe and Sam Spade as influences he grew up loving. The new trailer, he indicated, is meant to feel a little more grown-up than audiences might expect from a major animated spectacle, and that is by design.
The idea is not a late-career afterthought. In an earlier official first look, Netflix said Ray Gunn had been percolating in Bird’s mind for more than 30 years, since even before The Iron Giant, and that the fundamental concept had not changed across those decades: a blend of science fiction and classic detective cinema. Bird has also said he was grateful Netflix saw potential in a project that tried to do something new at a large scale, adding that animation is “too fun a medium, and too interesting, to limit what kind of stories can be told”.
Netflix’s latest announcement fixes the two-stage rollout. The film will play in selected cinemas from December 4, with a limited 70mm presentation among those engagements, before its global streaming debut on December 18. The studio has not, in Thursday’s briefing, published a full theatrical circuit or a running time.
Source : Netflix, X post, Tudum trailer briefing and first look.
Credit : Netflix’s X
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