Ray Gunn took 30 years to make. Netflix gives it 14 days in cinemas

Ray Gunn opens in a limited number of cinemas, some of them in 70mm, on 4 December. It arrives on Netflix on 18 December. That is a window of 14 days, for a film Brad Bird has been trying to make for roughly 30 years, and the arithmetic is worth doing slowly: 30 years is about 360 months, so every day this film spends on a cinema screen cost 26 months of waiting.

It had its world premiere at the BFI London Film Festival on Friday night, with Sam Rockwell voicing a detective in the retro-futurist city of Metropia, Scarlett Johansson as a nightclub singer and Tom Waits somewhere in the shadows. World of Reel rounded up the first reviews as mixed, which the scoreboard does not quite support. The Rotten Tomatoes score stood at 91% from 33 reviews the morning after. The Film Stage called it a return to the inventive form of Bird's first three animated features; ScreenRant gave it 6/10 and found the messaging heavy-handed. Nobody called it lazy.

The premiere is the easy part of this story. The release is the interesting one, because Ray Gunn is the only film I can think of that was shelved by one Warner Bros merger and then had its cinema release shrunk by the fallout from another, 30 years later.

Shelved by one merger

Bird conceived the film in the early 1990s and developed it with his Iron Giant co-writer Matthew Robbins as a hand-drawn feature for Turner Entertainment, where, according to Mental Floss's 2016 history, it was fully scripted and storyboarded. Turner executives never gave it a green light. Then Turner merged into Time Warner, a deal completed in 1996, and the new owner showed no interest in a noir detective story for grown-ups; Bird told Ain't It Cool News in 1999 that Hollywood treated the film as almost experimental. Warner steered him onto The Iron Giant instead.

You know how that went. The Iron Giant took about $31.7m worldwide against a budget of around $50m, a failure attributed then and since to Warner barely marketing it, and spent the next two decades becoming one of the most loved animated films ever made. Bird went to Pixar, made The Incredibles and Ratatouille, went into live action, and Ray Gunn sat in a drawer at Warner Bros.

Skydance Animation announced in February 2022 that it had picked the project up, with Bird directing. Along the way it moved with Skydance's output deal from Apple to Netflix, switched from hand-drawn to computer animation with a trimmed budget in 2023, and still came in at $150m or more, by The Hollywood Reporter's estimate. It is the third feature from the Skydance Animation deal at Netflix, after Spellbound in 2024 and Swapped earlier this year.

Squeezed by another

In the spring, Bird's team lobbied Netflix for a two-week IMAX run over Thanksgiving, TheWrap reported in June. The slot was free. Netflix had moved Greta Gerwig's Narnia: The Magician's Nephew to February 2027, and Bird had form, having helped put Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol into IMAX cinemas in 2011. Netflix gave the slot to David Fincher's The Adventures of Cliff Booth instead, which opens in IMAX on 25 November for two weeks before streaming on 23 December. Fincher, by TheWrap's account, had not even asked.

There is an irony in the choice of beneficiary. Fincher's last two films for Netflix, Mank and The Killer, both got short theatrical runs, and AMC, the chain that long refused to book Netflix titles on brief windows, began relenting after KPop Demon Hunters did real business in a two-day cinema outing in 2025. The machinery exists now. Netflix is simply using it for the film that did not ask.

Why would Netflix spend nothing on a $150m film it owns the release rights to? TheWrap's sources describe Ray Gunn as a "hot potato" between Netflix and Paramount Skydance, two companies that have spent this year at war. Paramount forced Netflix to abandon its attempt to buy Warner Bros, a contest whose debt bill we have covered, and has accused the streamer of a "scorched-earth campaign". Neither side wants to spend marketing money making the other's film look good. The film is the hostage.

So the pattern closes. A merger built around Warner Bros shelved Ray Gunn in 1996. The sale of Warner Bros in 2026, which is also remaking Paramount's streaming business, is the reason its cinema run is a fortnight of scattered 70mm bookings rather than two weeks on IMAX screens. Bird waited three decades for the corporate weather to clear. It never did.

There is a simpler reading, and TheWrap makes it: Netflix has never given any animated feature a wide theatrical release, whoever produced it, even though animation is reliably among the most-watched things on the platform. The 70mm engagements are a gesture at cinephilia, and a qualifying run for the animated feature Oscar, not a release. One filmmaker who made an animated film for Netflix put it to TheWrap plainly: "I don't make films to be screensavers."

Bird said in June, through an interview with Polygon, that he wanted the film on the biggest screen possible and did not know whether Netflix was listening. Friday's reception suggests the film would have survived the big screen just fine.

Ray Gunn screens next at the Montclair Film Festival on 17 October, opens in cinemas on 4 December, and streams worldwide on Netflix from 18 December.