The Ray Gunn trailer dropped on Netflix’s YouTube channel this week, and it’s the kind of first look that makes you want to buy a fedora, learn to say “the dame’s trouble” with a straight face, and possibly invest in a jetpack.
After roughly three decades of gestating in Brad Bird’s brain, the Ray Gunn trailer has finally given the world its first real taste of what happens when The Maltese Falcon and Buck Rogers have a baby raised entirely on Art Deco architecture.
So What Actually Is This Thing?
If you’ve somehow missed the run-up, here’s the elevator pitch, courtesy of Bird himself: it’s Bird’s original story with co-writer Matthew Robbins, and the man has literally called it “Maltese Falcon meets Buck Rogers,” which is either the most 1940s sentence ever spoken or the most accurate movie pitch of 2026.
The Ray Gunn trailer plants us in Metropia, a sprawling, futuristic city imagined the way people in 1939 might have pictured tomorrow — think chrome skyscrapers, flying cars, and buildings so tall they make actual Manhattan look like a starter home.
Netflix’s own Tudum team put it best, noting that the taller the skyscrapers get in Metropia, the longer the shadows stretch underneath them, which is either poetic or a subtle warning about property taxes.
Into this gleaming, morally compromised metropolis walks private eye Raymond Gunn, voiced by Sam Rockwell, a man so committed to old-school gumshoe work that he and his alien partner are among the last detectives still doing legwork themselves in an age dominated by tiny robotic “pry bots”.
That’s right — even the future has automated away detective work, and Ray Gunn is basically a Luddite with a badge. He gets tangled up with Venus Nova (Scarlett Johansson), described across nearly every outlet covering the Ray Gunn trailer as a multimedia superstar whose scandals could end her career or, more dramatically, her life.
The Voice Cast Is Genuinely Stacked
This is where the Ray Gunn trailer coverage gets fun, because the cast reads like someone raided both the Oscars and a very cool dinner party. Alongside Rockwell and Johansson, Tom Waits voices Eyera, described by SlashFilm as Ray’s alien partner, and by pretty much everyone else as the single best piece of stunt casting of the year — because if you’re building a gravelly, world-weary noir universe, who better than the actual patron saint of gravelly and world-weary. Bird himself gushed that he’s admired Waits for a long time as a rare multi-talent who does both music and acting, and honestly, same.
Rounding out the voice cast are Alan Tudyk, Matt Berry, Bobby Cannavale, Michael Chernus, and Kether Donohue, per SlashFilm’s rundown — plenty of names to fill out Metropia’s underworld of aliens, hangers-on, and presumably at least one guy who says “youse guys” in space.
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Wait, Theaters? In 2026? For a Cartoon?
Here’s the genuinely surprising bit buried in the Ray Gunn trailer news: this isn’t going straight to streaming. According to Deadline, Netflix is giving Ray Gunn a limited theatrical run starting December 4, including select 70mm screenings, before it streams globally on December 18.
As What’s on Netflix points out, animated films almost never get the 70mm treatment, which is basically Hollywood’s way of saying “we think this one’s going to look spectacular on the biggest screen you can find” — and, not coincidentally, is also the kind of move studios make when they’re gearing up for an awards push. Runtime clocks in at just under two hours, and it carries a PG rating.
The Retrofuturism Is the Whole Point
Every single outlet that’s touched the Ray Gunn trailer has clocked the same thing: this is a very specific, very deliberate flavor of “future.” Bird explained his thinking directly, asking essentially: what if cities just kept growing upward and more streamlined, cars could fly, and jetpacks became a normal commute option? It’s retrofuturism — the future as imagined by people who’d never seen a smartphone — filtered through Art Deco skyscrapers and noir lighting.
Inverse went as far as lumping it into a whole wave of retrofuturistic sci-fi hitting screens between late 2026 and early 2027, alongside Blade Runner 2099 and Apple TV’s Neuromancer — so apparently we’re all collectively nostalgic for a future that never happened, which tracks.
ScreenRant also flagged the trailer’s opening shot — a car banking across Metropia’s skyline — as wearing its Blade Runner influences proudly on its sleeve, while Cartoon Brew and AWN have been tracking this project’s long, winding road since the first stills dropped, calling it one of the most hyped titles in Skydance Animation’s history.
The Origin Story Is Almost Better Than the Trailer
Buckle up, because the making-of lore around the Ray Gunn trailer might be the most 1990s-animation-nerd story in existence. Per Variety, Bird first got the idea for Ray Gunn after watching a trailer for the Peter Gunn revival back in 1989 — reportedly, he misheard the title, and a very different concept was born in his imagination.
The project actually got greenlit at Turner Feature Animation in the ’90s, got shelved when Bird went off to make The Iron Giant, and has been quietly haunting him ever since — through The Incredibles, Ratatouille, and even his live-action detour into Mission: Impossible.
In 2021, he finally signed on with Skydance Animation to bring it to life, reuniting him with former Pixar chief John Lasseter and Skydance’s David Ellison and Dana Goldberg. Thirty years is a long time to sit on a pun about a detective named “Ray Gunn,” but here we are.
Should You Be Excited?
If early reactions to the Ray Gunn trailer are anything to go by — and outlets from Empire to Netflix’s own Tudum have been uniformly enthusiastic — yes.
This is a director with an Oscar-winning track record finally getting to make the movie he’s wanted to make since before some of its target audience was born, with a voice cast that includes an Oscar winner, an Oscar nominee, and Tom Waits doing what Tom Waits does.
It’s a detective story about a man clinging to the old ways in a city racing toward the future, which is, charmingly, kind of exactly what this trailer’s own journey to the screen has been about too.
Mark your calendars: theaters (and 70mm bragging rights) on December 4, Netflix globally on December 18.
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