Danny Boyle has directed a zombie apocalypse, a Mumbai game show and an Olympic opening ceremony, but he has never once brought a film to Venice. He arrives on the Lido with Ink, a period drama about a newspaper — and about the man who bought it to break the rules of the British press. Adapted from James Graham’s stage play, the film opens the 83rd edition and screens in the main competition, which makes Boyle a first-time Golden Lion contender. Its subject is the birth of the modern Sun, and Graham’s premise has never been comfortable: a tabloid is a machine built to give readers exactly what they want, and the wanting is the real story.

That premise began on stage. Graham first staged Ink in London in 2017, a fast, direct-address newsroom play that turned the founding of a tabloid into something close to a heist. The film keeps the engine — Britain in 1969, an ailing paper, and a young Australian proprietor who wants to overtake the mighty Daily Mirror inside a year — and hands it to a director whose signature is velocity. Guy Pearce plays Rupert Murdoch as the outsider with a chip and a plan; Jack O’Connell is Larry Lamb, the working-class editor Murdoch hires and then pushes past every line Fleet Street thought it had drawn.

Claire Foy plays Jules Davies, a character Graham built as a composite of the women who worked in that newsroom — a device that lets the film hold its own subject to account rather than simply celebrate the caper. The casting matters because Ink is not a film about journalism in the abstract. It is about the moment a paper decided that circulation was the only argument that counted, and about the editors who discovered how far they were willing to go to win it. Pearce and O’Connell are the axis: a proprietor who treats every taboo as a market to be tested, and an editor hungry enough to keep testing them. Much of what the British press became over the following half-century is folded into that first year.

The interesting tension, before a single frame has screened, is formal. Graham’s play works because it is theatrical — because it lets its newsmen speak straight to the audience and argue their own case. Boyle is the opposite kind of storyteller, an image-and-momentum director who rarely lets a scene sit still. How a script built on the rhythm of talk survives the move into his hands is the question the premiere will answer, and it is a more genuine one than most opening-night galas offer. This is a play about persuasion being directed by a filmmaker who persuades through motion.

The festival gives the film a loaded stage. Boyle opens a competition of twenty-one titles — five of them Italian — under a jury led by Maggie Gyllenhaal, in an edition that will hand career Golden Lions to George Clooney and Ellen Burstyn. There is a neatness to the programming, too: a festival that trades on prestige is opening with a story about an outsider who decided prestige was worthless if it did not sell. Handing that story a Netflix-backed British production about the concentration of media power is itself a statement about where the festival, and the industry around it, now sits.

Ink premieres on opening night, 2 September, and competes for the Golden Lion awarded on 12 September. From there its path is the modern one: a US theatrical release on 11 December, before the film reaches Netflix in the United States and Latin America on 8 January, the same day it opens in UK cinemas. Venice sees it first — and, for once, sees Boyle.

Tags: Venice Film Festival, 2026, Guy Pearce, danny boyle, Ink, Jack O'Connell