Danny Boyle opens the 83rd Venice Film Festival on September 2 with Ink, and it marks a notable return. This is his first film outside a franchise since Yesterday in 2019, and his first time ever competing on the Lido, something he called his baptism at the festival. It premieres in the main competition, in the running for the Golden Lion.
The film goes back to 1969, the year a young Australian named Rupert Murdoch bought a struggling London paper called The Sun and set out to remake it. Guy Pearce plays Murdoch. Jack O'Connell plays Larry Lamb, the Yorkshire editor Murdoch hired to run the paper and turn it into something British journalism had never quite seen: loud, cheeky, willing to do whatever it took to push sales higher. Within a few years they had built the best-selling newspaper in the country, and changed what a newspaper was allowed to be. Claire Foy plays a reporter named Jules Davies, a fictional figure drawn from several real women who worked the newsroom in those years.
The script comes from James Graham, adapting his own acclaimed stage play, and Boyle framed the story in terms that reach straight into the present. Long before cable news, clickbait, and social feeds, he pointed out, these two men built a machine for grabbing attention at any cost. The film is about where that machine came from.
Why it matters
A period drama about a newspaper deal could sound dry on paper. This one isn't, because it's really an origin story for the world we live in now. The tabloid logic Murdoch and Lamb invented, give people the loudest, most sensational version and watch the numbers climb, is the same logic that runs the internet today. Boyle is not making a museum piece. He's tracing a line from a 1969 print room to the feed in your pocket.
It also arrives loaded with awards-season weight. Pearce is coming off an Oscar nomination for The Brutalist, Boyle has taken this kind of biographical drama to the Oscars before with Steve Jobs, and Netflix is giving it a December theatrical run built for exactly that race. Whether it lands is a question the Venice reviews will start answering within days. Either way, it's the film the festival chose to lead with, and that alone makes it worth watching for.
Ink premieres at Venice on September 2, opens in US theaters December 11, and reaches Netflix on January 8, 2027.
About this film
