The 83rd Venice Film Festival has found its opening night movie in Danny Boyle’s “Ink,” starring Jack O’Connell, Guy Pearce and Claire Foy.
The biographical newspaper drama will kick off the 2026 iteration of the international film festival with its premiere in Italy on Sept. 2. The event will then run through Sept. 12.
“I’ve been to the Biennale many times, but this is my baptism at the film festival – a huge honour to be in a city of such extraordinary art and opening this great festival with my new film ‘Ink.’ 1969 — the year we first walked on the moon — and the year Rupert Murdoch and Larry Lamb launched a newspaper that was to change the world far more,” Boyle shared in a Thursday statement. “Long before Fox News, click bait and Truth Social; decades before Twitter, Facebook, Google and Only Fans, these two men created a new tabloid which against all the odds became the biggest selling newspaper in the world. Cheeky, irreverent, daring: The super soaraway Sun challenged the establishment and remade our world for the modern era. A script by James Graham I felt compelled and privileged to make.”
Indeed, original playwright James Graham wrote the screenplay about “a group of visionaries and misfits who had an idea for a new kind of news — one that would give the people what they want and would change the face of the world we live in today,” per the logline. Pearce plays Murdoch; O’Connell plays Lamb.
Boyle produces with Tessa Ross, Michael Ellenberg and Tracey Seaward. Executive producers include Anna Marsh, Ron Halpern, Joe Naftalin, Tonia Davis, Zoe Edwards, Sudie Smyth and Graham. StudioCanal fully financed the film.
“An Oscar-winning director, one of the leading playwrights on the London theater scene, and three of the most acclaimed actors in contemporary British cinema—these are the credentials behind Danny Boyle’s film,” festival director Alberto Barbera added. “Enhanced by the performances of Jack O’Connell, Guy Pearce and Claire Foy, which screenwriter James Graham adapted from his own play of the same name. It is an account of publisher Rupert Murdoch’s acquisition of the daily newspaper The Sun, which he entrusted to the unscrupulous Larry Lamb, turning it into Britain’s best-selling tabloid at the expense of its rival, The Mirror. I would like to thank StudioCanal, Media Res and House Productions for granting us the honor of opening the Venice Film Festival with such a highly anticipated film.”
