Brad Bird's Ray Gunn premieres in London, and Bird says it did not really take 30 years

Brad Bird's Ray Gunn had its world premiere at the London Film Festival on Saturday, and the coverage around it keeps returning to one number: 30 years. Bird himself says that number is misleading.

In an interview with Deadline ahead of the premiere, he said the mistake people make is saying he worked on the film for 30 years. He didn't. He gave it up, expected it to go the way most shelved ideas go, and only came back to it because it would not leave him alone. The headline on that same interview still calls it "The 30-Year Journey".

The real story is less about patience and more about who owned the idea.

Warner Bros. shelved it, then kept it

Bird first developed Ray Gunn at Turner Entertainment in the 1990s. When Turner merged with Time Warner, the project was shelved. Warner Bros. wasn't interested, so Bird made The Iron Giant instead, a film he says the studio did not promote particularly well.

The bigger problem was the paperwork. When a studio declines to make your film, Bird pointed out, it still owns it. You can't take it elsewhere, and studios have no wish to watch an idea they rejected succeed somewhere else. Ray Gunn sat locked up.

He learned from it. By the time he started on The Incredibles, he paid for its development himself and kept the rights, so that anyone who liked the idea would have to make it or hand it back.

Years later Warner Bros. came back to him. Management had changed and nobody remembered what their predecessors had been doing. Ray Gunn was moving forward there again, until AT&T bought the studio, the pandemic hit and, in Bird's words, a lot of other things happened. He gave them the same choice he had built into The Incredibles: make it or give it back. They gave it back.

It ended up at Skydance, and back near Warner Bros.

The project landed at Skydance Animation, under the studio's original deal with Netflix. Deadline notes the irony: that move means Ray Gunn is, in part, once again connected to Warners. The producers are John Lasseter, Bird, David Ellison, Dana Goldberg and Lisa Beroud.

Bird's own version of the ending is simpler. The idea stayed with him, he wanted to see the film, and the only way to see it was to make it. He finally found people willing to help him do that.

Bird says the production itself was fast and lean. There was not much time, and the budget was tighter than anyone would believe for what the team was trying to put on screen.

What the film is

• Setting: Metropia, a retro-futurist city where humans and aliens live side by side and cars fly. Bird describes it as the future as seen from the 1940s; Deadline's review calls it an "alternate future" channeling 1939.
• Story: Ray Gunn (Sam Rockwell), an old-school private detective, is hired to protect pop superstar Venus Nova (Scarlett Johansson), who is accused of murdering one of her ex-husbands.
• Voice cast: Tom Waits as Eye Ra Kadock, Gunn's one-eyed alien partner, plus Alan Tudyk, Matt Berry, Bobby Cannavale, Michelle Rodriguez, Michael Chernus, Kether Donohue, Kathryn Hunter, Aasif Mandvi, John Ratzenberger and Patton Oswalt.
• Script: Bird and Matthew Robbins.
• Music: a score by Michael Giacchino, with songs by New Zealand's Kimba. Johansson sings.
• Rating and length: PG, 1 hour 59 minutes.
• Release: in cinemas from December 4, on Netflix from December 18. That is a two-week theatrical window.

An animated noir for adults, from a director told animation had a ceiling

Bird has been arguing against the idea of animation as a kids' rating for his whole career. Early on, he recalled, a studio head told him with total confidence that no animated film would ever make more than $50 million, and that only a Disney film would come close.

Ray Gunn is his first feature since Incredibles 2, and Deadline's review already pitches it as a Best Animated Feature contender. Bird has won that Oscar twice, for The Incredibles and Ratatouille. His other credits include two live-action films, Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol and Tomorrowland.

He is not planning a sequel. Asked about expanding the world, he mimed shooting himself and said that this one took 30 years, and he is not making another one when he is 30 years older. The man who says it didn't take 30 years still uses the number himself.

What is still unknown

• The budget. Bird calls it tight; nobody has published a figure.
• How wide the December theatrical release will be. Netflix has only given the date.
• Whether the two-week window holds if the film performs in cinemas.

Warner Bros. shelved Ray Gunn in the 1990s and held on to it for years. It finally got made somewhere else, and that somewhere else is connected to Warner Bros. again.