Danny Boyle is diving headfirst into the wild rise of The Sun. The first trailer has arrived for Ink, with Jack O’Connell playing hard-driving editor Larry Lamb and Guy Pearce transforming into Australian media magnate Rupert Murdoch. And while it’s officially being billed as a teaser, there’s a lot packed into its two minutes: ambition, scandal, rapidly escalating consequences and the kind of propulsive energy you’d expect from Danny Boyle. Watch the trailer above.

Set in 1969, Ink heads into Britain’s cut-throat newspaper world as Murdoch takes ownership of the struggling The Sun and recruits Yorkshire-born Lamb, then Northern editor of the Daily Mail, to help turn it into something that could take on the competition.

And Pearce’s Murdoch isn’t looking for refined nuance. “Larry, Britain is crying out for something new. Something dangerous. And something fun!” he tells Lamb.

Give the People What They Want

The trailer makes the mission pretty clear: shake up the establishment, grab readers and don’t be afraid to get messy. O’Connell’s Lamb quickly gets to work fine-tuning exactly what kind of newspaper they’re creating. “We want stories, gossip,” he says. “Any scandal is fair game.”

The real Murdoch acquired The Sun in 1969 and installed Lamb as editor, with the newspaper relaunched as a tabloid that November. The pair set about challenging the hugely successful Daily Mirror with a more populist, irreverent approach to news and entertainment, beginning a transformation that would have a major impact on Britain’s newspaper industry.

Boyle appears to be attacking that story with anything but the restraint of a dusty historical drama, racing through the thrill of building something new while steadily revealing the uglier questions lurking underneath. That’s where Claire Foy comes in. She plays Jules Davies, a fictional journalist at The Sun, who increasingly looks to be serving as a moral counterweight to Lamb’s pursuit of the next headline.

As the pressure mounts and the consequences become considerably more serious, Jules warns him: “Just because you can make something public doesn’t mean that you should.”

Lamb’s response to the chaos as the trailer reaches its final moments: “Run it. Run it.”

Danny Boyle Wants the Audience to Feel Complicit

That collision between the excitement of breaking the old rules and the darkness that follows appears to be central to Boyle’s approach.

Speaking at the Venice Film Festival, as quoted by Entertainment Weekly, Boyle said he deliberately didn’t want Ink to present Murdoch in purely monstrous terms, pointing to what the media mogul represented when he arrived in Britain.

“He represented, at the time, a breath of fresh air in what was a very rigid British society,” Boyle said. He also spoke about the prejudice Murdoch faced as an Australian and his hostility towards Britain’s establishment, something Boyle said he personally shared.

Boyle said that sense of disruption was important to the film’s approach to The Sun‘s rise. He described it as getting onto a slide that initially feels exciting and fun, with the filmmakers wanting viewers to experience that appeal for themselves before seeing where it leads: “It was important to us that the audience felt complicit.”

It’s an interesting angle for a film about figures and a newspaper that would go on to become enormously controversial. Rather than simply beginning with condemnation, Ink appears interested in the seductive rush of disrupting an industry, giving people what they want and watching the circulation numbers respond – before asking what happens when “anything is fair game” becomes the guiding philosophy.

The screenplay comes from James Graham, adapting his own acclaimed 2017 stage play. Graham’s story focuses on the early relationship between Lamb and Murdoch and the reinvention of The Sun, rather than attempting to cover the many decades of Murdoch’s media empire that followed.

Strong Early Reviews After Venice Premiere

Ink has just had its world premiere, opening the 83rd Venice International Film Festival on September 2 and screening in competition. The early critical response has been strong. At the time of writing, the film holds an 86% critics score on Rotten Tomatoes.

Vulture has gone as far as describing it as Boyle’s best film in decades, while reviews have particularly highlighted O’Connell’s performance and the director’s typically frenetic handling of the material.

Alongside O’Connell, Pearce and Foy, the cast includes Blake Harrison, Patrick Kennedy, Angus Imrie and Brian Gleeson.

When Will Ink Be Released?

StudioCanal will release Ink in Australian and New Zealand cinemas on January 7, 2027. The film opens in select U.S. cinemas on December 11, 2026 before arriving on Netflix in the U.S. and Latin America on January 8, 2027.

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