Danny Boyle makes his Venice debut with Ink, a Rupert Murdoch biopic starring Jack O’Connell, Guy Pearce, and Claire Foy, opening the 83rd festival on Sept. 2.
There is something almost too perfect about a film called Ink opening the Venice Film Festival. Venice is the oldest. It is where the gatekeeping still happens in morning coats and press badges. And the subject of Ink: Rupert Murdoch’s 1969 acquisition of The Sun and his installation of editor Larry Lamb to turn it into Britain’s most-read tabloid, is a story about exactly what happens when the gatekeepers stop gatekeeping and someone decides to blow the whole thing up for circulation numbers.
This is also Danny Boyle’s baptism at the Lido. In over thirty years of making films: Shallow Grave, Trainspotting, Slumdog Millionaire, 127 Hours, 28 Days Later, he has never screened at Venice. That changes on September 2. The choice to bring Ink here, in competition for the Golden Lion, is not accidental. It is a statement about what kind of film this is and what kind of reception Boyle is inviting.
The Return That Matters
Ink is Boyle’s first original non-franchise film since Yesterday in 2019. He spent the intervening years returning to the 28 Days Later universe he co-created, directing 28 Years Later in 2025, producing 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple in 2026. Both were franchise movies executed with craft. Ink is something different: a deliberate step back toward the prestige single-story mode that built his reputation.
That distinction matters to the film finance world as much as to the critical establishment. A director of Boyle’s stature voluntarily leaving a successful franchise to make a playwright’s biopic about a living media titan, fully financed by StudioCanal, with distribution locked across the UK, France, Germany, Poland, Benelux, Australia, and New Zealand before a single festival screening, is exactly the kind of greenlight signal that tells investors and development executives where the appetite for prestige material actually sits in 2026. The Venice opener slot is confirmation, not aspiration.
Jack O’Connell, Guy Pearce, and the Architecture of a Tabloid
The casting is doing real work. Jack O’Connell as Larry Lamb is a specific choice, O’Connell has built a career playing men whose moral clarity is real but whose methods keep getting away from them. He broke through in Starred Up and Unbroken, and most recently appeared in Sinners. He is not a star in the conventional sense, but he is the kind of actor a director casts when the role requires something a star would protect himself from.
Guy Pearce as Murdoch is the casting that will generate the think pieces. Fresh off an Academy Award nomination for The Brutalist, Pearce is constitutionally incapable of playing a villain who doesn’t believe he’s right. That specificity is the whole point. Venice director Alberto Barbera framed it with diplomatic precision in the announcement: Murdoch “entrusted” Lamb to build Britain’s best-selling tabloid “at the expense of its rival, The Mirror.” The word entrusted is doing a great deal of work.
Claire Foy as Jules Davies rounds out the central trio. Foy has spent the years since The Crown making quiet, structurally interesting choices — All of Us Strangers, The Electrical Life of Louis Wain. This is another one.
The Play, the Screenplay, and What James Graham Knows
The film adapts James Graham’s Tony-nominated stage play of the same name. Graham — Dear England, Sherwood, Brexit — has made a career out of dramatizing British institutions at the exact moments they fracture. Parliament, game shows, national identity, tabloid journalism: the connective tissue is always the same. Power runs through a system until someone decides to use it differently, and then everything changes.
Boyle produces alongside Tessa Ross, a reunion from Slumdog Millionaire, and Michael Ellenberg (The Morning Show). Tracey Seaward (The Two Popes) also produces. Behind the camera: DOP Alwin H. Küchler (Steve Jobs), editor Fin Oates (Warfare), and music by Daniel Pemberton, who has earned a reputation as one of the most versatile composers working in British prestige cinema. The producing team alone signals this was built carefully and without haste.
Ink screens September 2 in the Sala Grande at the Palazzo del Cinema. Venice runs through September 12.
A Film Murdoch Can’t Buy His Way Out Of
Rupert Murdoch has survived The Crown, two congressional testimonies, a $787 million defamation settlement, and the death of one of the most famous tabloid scandals in British press history. A Danny Boyle film opening Venice is, by any reasonable measure, the least of his problems.
But it is the one that arrives on the Lido with a Golden Lion in play, and in a year when the festival lineup is still being assembled, Ink lands as the opener with the weight of a period drama that knows exactly what it is. For the executives, financiers, and development teams who will be watching from the Palazzo bar, that weight is its own kind of signal. The prestige biopic is not dead. It just needed the right director, the right cast, and a story that has been waiting since 1969 to be told properly.
Ink may be the answer.
FAQ
What is Danny Boyle’s film Ink about?
Ink is a biographical drama about Rupert Murdoch’s 1969 acquisition of the British newspaper The Sun. The film follows Murdoch’s decision to install editor Larry Lamb — depicted as the unscrupulous architect of the paper’s transformation into Britain’s best-selling tabloid, at the direct expense of its rival, The Mirror. The screenplay is written by James Graham, adapted from his Tony-nominated stage play.
Who stars in Ink and when does it premiere?
The film stars Jack O’Connell as Larry Lamb, Guy Pearce as Rupert Murdoch, and Claire Foy as Jules Davies. It opens the 83rd Venice Film Festival on September 2, 2026, screening in competition in the Sala Grande at the Palazzo del Cinema on the Lido. The festival runs through September 12.
Who directed and produced Ink, and where will it be released?
Danny Boyle directed from James Graham’s screenplay. Boyle produces alongside Tessa Ross and Michael Ellenberg, with Tracey Seaward also producing. StudioCanal fully financed the film and will handle theatrical release across the UK, France, Germany, Poland, Benelux, Australia, and New Zealand. A U.S. domestic distributor has not yet been announced.
