Brad Bird makes a new movie so rarely that each one feels like an event. The Iron Giant and Incredibles director hasn't released a film since 2015's underrated Tomorrowland, and now he's back with Ray Gun - a dieselpunk noir starring Sam Rockwell, Scarlett Johansson, and Tom Waits.
The first images dropped today, and they're gorgeous: a vast retro-future cityscape called Metropia, rendered in the chunky Art Deco aesthetic of 1939 futurism. Rockwell plays private eye Raymond Gunn (yes, really), drawn into a case involving aliens, murder, and multimedia star Venus Nova. It's Blade Runner meets Dick Tracy meets whatever fever dream produced that logline.
What makes this exciting isn't just Bird's return - it's that Ray Gun is original IP. Not a sequel, not a reboot, not based on existing intellectual property. In 2026, that's practically revolutionary. Bird could have done Incredibles 3 and made Disney billions. Instead, he spent a decade developing something new.
The mid-budget auteur swing is basically extinct. Studios want $200 million tentpoles or $5 million genre films - nothing in between. Ray Gun reportedly cost around $90 million, which used to be standard for ambitious studio filmmaking and now feels positively quaint. That it exists at all is a minor miracle.
Bird has always been interested in retro-futurism - Tomorrowland was explicitly about that aesthetic - but this looks more stylistically committed. The production design appears to be doing the heavy lifting, creating a world that feels both familiar and alien. Whether the story justifies that world-building remains to be seen.
But here's what I know: Bird doesn't make boring films. They might be flawed (Tomorrowland definitely was), but they're never generic. Ray Gun will be weird, ambitious, and personal. And in an era of algorithm-tested focus-group cinema, that's enough to earn my attention.
