Brad Bird said he never took Ray Gunn to Pixar, even though he spent years building the idea in his head, because he believed the film belonged somewhere else. The animated feature is now headed to Netflix on Dec. 18 after first premiering at the BFI London Film Festival on Oct. 10.
Bird said the project had been on his mind for three decades and only found its home at Skydance Animation. He described Ray Gunn as a noir detective caper set in a Jetsons-style retro future, which he said made it a harder fit for Pixar’s usual audience than for a studio willing to back a stranger, older-skewing premise.
That is the reason Bird gave for skipping Pixar altogether. He said that if the film carried a Pixar label, some viewers would assume it was meant for the same audience as the studio’s other releases, and some parents would look at it and think, “my little Jimmy would be unhappy at this.” In Bird’s view, the label itself would have created the wrong expectation before the first frame ever played.
The title came from the same kind of snap of recognition. Bird said he first ran into the idea after hearing The B-52s song Planet Claire, then realized the name itself carried the hook: “Ray Gunn: It’s a guy’s name. He’s a detective, but it’s in the future.” He also joked to himself, “This is not Peter Gunn. What is this?” before settling on the spelling and the image it suggested.
Bird’s path to this point helps explain why Skydance was the match. He pointed to his work on Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol as a reason the studio felt obvious to him, saying it had gone well and that Skydance was happy with the result. He has spent much of his career moving between Pixar and outside projects, including Ratatouille, The Incredibles 2, Tomorrowland and an abandoned attempt to adapt Will Eisner’s The Spirit, and Ray Gunn now joins that list as a film he chose to place beyond Pixar’s branding.
The project has also carried over one of Bird’s most durable creative partnerships. Michael Giacchino is directing the orchestra score for Ray Gunn at Abbey Road Studios in London, extending a collaboration that began with The Incredibles in 2004 and later included Giacchino’s Oscar win for Up in 2010. The new film is being scored by a 74-piece orchestra, underscoring that Bird is treating it as a major feature rather than a side experiment.
What happens next is already set. Ray Gunn will reach the BFI London Film Festival before its Netflix launch, giving audiences their first look at a film Bird says he had been tinkering with every now and again for three decades. The question now is not whether he found a place for it, but whether viewers who expect Pixar-style familiarity will meet a movie he clearly wanted to keep outside that frame.
