The 83rd Venice International Film Festival opened on 2 September 2026 with “Ink”, directed by Danny Boyle and adapted by James Graham from his own 2017 stage play. Guy Pearce plays Rupert Murdoch, Jack O’Connell plays Larry Lamb, and the subject is the year 1969, when Murdoch bought a failing London newspaper called The Sun and hired Lamb to remake it.
Most opening-night coverage will be about Murdoch. The more useful question for anyone who makes things is narrower and harder: what does a writer actually do when he is handed his own successful play and told to turn it into a film?
The problem with adapting yourself
Adapting somebody else’s work gives you a licence that adapting your own does not. You can cut a beloved scene because you never loved it. You can invert a character because you were never the person who defended that character in rehearsal. When the writer and the adaptor are the same person, every cut is an argument with a previous version of yourself who had reasons.
Graham has the additional problem that his play worked. “Ink” ran in 2017 and did what a good play about journalism does: it made a room full of people care about page layout. Theatre is very good at this. It has a natural bias towards rooms where people argue, and a newspaper is a room where people argue. Two men decide what a country will read tomorrow, and the whole apparatus of the medium, one set, live bodies, an audience that cannot look away, pushes the material in the right direction.
Film has the opposite bias. It wants to leave the room. It wants the streets outside, the presses, the faces of the readers, the country changing. Everything that made the play efficient becomes, on screen, a scene of two men talking in an office.
The invented character
The single most revealing choice in the film is a person who did not exist. Claire Foy plays Jules Davies, a Sun reporter who is fictional, standing among characters, Murdoch and Lamb, who are not.
This is a structural decision before it is a moral one. A film about the birth of the modern tabloid has a hole in the middle of it: the two men at the top are the ones with agency, and they are also the two least able to say what the paper is doing to anybody. A senior editor cannot credibly narrate his own damage. Someone further down can. An invented reporter gives the story a point of view that can be inside the newsroom and outside the decision, which is exactly the vantage the play did not need and the film cannot do without.
It also carries a risk that anyone writing from real events will recognise. The moment you invent a person and place them among the named dead and living, you have taken responsibility for a claim: not that this happened, but that something like this happened to someone like her. That is a defensible claim and a fragile one. It survives only if the invented character is used to open the world rather than to settle the argument. Put a speech in her mouth that resolves the film’s moral question and the whole structure collapses into editorial.
Casting against the caricature
Pearce as Murdoch is a casting decision with a thesis in it. The available version of Murdoch in 2026 is the finished one: the mogul, the political force, the man in the select committee hearing. That figure is almost impossible to dramatise because he has no need left. In 1969 Murdoch was a 38-year-old Australian outsider buying a paper nobody else wanted, treated by Fleet Street as a provincial upstart. Playing the man before he became the noun is the only way the film has anywhere to go.
O’Connell’s Lamb is the harder part and the more interesting one. Lamb was the professional: the editor who actually built the thing, who understood that the paper’s readers were being condescended to by every other title on the street, and and who was proved right commercially on a scale nobody on Fleet Street had predicted. Films about famous men usually give the craftsman one scene of doubt and move on. Whether “Ink” gives Lamb a full argument, rather than a conscience, is the test of it.
The Yorkshire that stood in for Fleet Street
Principal photography began in London in October 2025, with further filming in Saltaire, Hebden Bridge and Halifax in West Yorkshire. The producers are House Productions, Media Res, Decibel Films and StudioCanal.
The Yorkshire locations are worth a moment. Saltaire is a Victorian model village built around a mill, a place designed on the proposition that an industrialist could organise the lives of the people who worked for him. Shooting a film about the industrialisation of British public opinion in and around nineteenth-century industrial architecture is either a very good instinct or a very fortunate accident of the location budget. Either way it does work that dialogue does not have to do.
Opening a festival with a film that will be on a streaming service
“Ink” premiered in competition at Venice and is scheduled for a US theatrical release on 11 December 2026, then arrives on Netflix in the US and Latin America on 8 January 2027, the same day it opens in cinemas in the UK and Ireland.
That release pattern is now normal enough to be invisible, but it changes what an opening film is for. A festival premiere used to be the first step in a slow theatrical rollout, and the reviews written on the Lido had months to do their work. A film that reaches most of its audience through a subscription four months later is using Venice for something else: to be treated as cinema by the people who decide what counts as cinema, before the delivery mechanism says otherwise.
For anyone making work in 2026 the lesson is not about streaming economics. It is that the frame around a piece of work is part of the work’s argument. Graham and Boyle have made a film about a proprietor who understood before anyone else that the container, a cheap tabloid, changed what the contents were allowed to be. Launching it from the oldest film festival in the world, in competition, is the same insight applied to themselves.
The jury led by Maggie Gyllenhaal announces the Golden Lion on 12 September.
