SerpApi.Org
Danny Boyle’s not a director you can pin down. He arrived on the scene with a transgressive comedy about heroin addicts (Trainspotting), and then filled the world with zombies in 28 Days Later. He’s anointed a Slumdog Millionaire, made the world forget about the Beatles in the film Yesterday, and even chronicled the creation of Apple in Steve Jobs. Now, the sixty-nine-year-old director is turning his attention to what he’s labeled the “cheeky, irreverent, [and] daring” men who established modern tabloid news: Larry Lamb and Rupert Murdoch.
The upcoming film, titled Ink, will have its world premiere at the 2026 Venice Film Festival in September. According to the director, he felt “compelled” to tell Murdoch’s story after seeing playwright James Graham’s Tony-nominated play of the same name in 2019. The story follows editor Larry Lamb’s creation of a lighter, more lowbrow news digest to compete with The Mirror in 1969, before Rupert Murdoch takes over and turns The Sun into a more conservative news outlet capable of swaying public opinion. Murdoch then heads to America to develop Fox News, telling Lamb at the end of the play that “People like stories."
Guy Pearce (The Brutalist) is set to play the billionaire newspaper titan in his early days. Jack O'Connell (Sinners, 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple) will co-star as Lamb, alongside Claire Foy as Jules Davies. Per Variety, the film was already purchased for distribution by Netflix for a release likely later this year.
“1969—the year we first walked on the moon—and the year Rupert Murdoch & Larry Lamb launched a newspaper that was to change the world far more,” Boyle wrote in a press release for his first Venice Film Festival entry.
“Long before Fox News, click bait, and Truth Social; decades before Twitter, Facebook, Google & Only Fans, these 2 men created a new tabloid which against all the odds became the biggest selling newspaper in the world,” he continued. “The super soaraway Sun challenged the establishment and remade our world for the modern era.”
For now, it’s unclear just what tone Boyle will take on Murdoch’s origin story, even if one can imagine that he’s likely to stay close to the play’s image of The Sun as the catalyst for the world’s dip in journalistic ethics. Lamb and Murdoch chase success at all costs in Ink, and they never look back. Murdoch’s entertainment empire was later the inspiration for Brian Cox’s character, Logan Roy, in the HBO series Succession. Today, he remains one of the richest men in the world at age ninety-five.
Something tells me he’s not going to enjoy this movie, even if it’s a powerful biopic about the dangers of unethical journalism for the ages. I can just picture the New York Post headline now. . . “INK STINKS!”
