Netflix wants the “ink” to dry on its Oscar prospects.
Danny Boyle made his first trip to Venice with “Ink,” his adaptation of James Graham’s stage sensation, which opened the 83rd edition in competition before moving through Telluride and Toronto, with the streamer giving it a December theatrical release and a January streaming date.
The early temperature is reading warm. “Ink” drew a four-minute standing ovation on opening night in Venice, and the reactions filtering out of Telluride have been buzzing across the mountains, the kind of enthusiasm and respect a Netflix campaign is built to amplify.
The subject is an origin myth of modern media: Rupert Murdoch’s 1969 acquisition of a dying tabloid called The Sun and the rapid transformation that followed. Graham, adapting his own Tony-nominated play, approaches the story with the mechanics of a heist. Boyle supplies the velocity.
The central question is not simply how Murdoch built a newspaper. It is how two men helped invent the modern attention economy that shapes all of our lives today.
Guy Pearce plays a brash, thirty-something Murdoch, an outsider with a chip on his shoulder and a plan for disrupting Fleet Street. Jack O’Connell plays editor Larry Lamb, the working-class newspaperman Murdoch pushes past every line the establishment believes cannot be crossed.
Both actors have obvious awards narratives, but two very different categories to break into.
Pearce arrives two years after his first Oscar nomination, a supporting actor bid for “The Brutalist,” which gives him the benefit of recent Academy recognition. And the role could hardly be more of the moment. Murdoch is a figure many hold responsible for the fractured, combustible information environment the U.S. is living through right now and there is a particular charge in watching an actor humanize the young man who lit the fuse. That timeliness is the kind of thing that fuels an Oscar campaign.
O’Connell arrives with something different: momentum. Between “Sinners” and the “28 Years Later” films, he is coming off a stretch that has significantly raised his visibility. Being a hot commodity right now, and perhaps even a package deal with Pearce in voters’ minds, could give him a fighting shot in a very crowded best actor field.
We have seen roles like Pearce’s cakewalk to nominations before, purely on the nature of the part, even when pundits wrote them off early. Look at the run of real-life figures who landed supporting bids: Jon Voight in “Ali” (2001), Matt Damon in “Invictus” (2009), Kenneth Branagh in “My Week with Marilyn” (2011), Christopher Plummer in “All the Money in the World” (2017), Sam Rockwell in “Vice” (2018), J.K. Simmons in “Being the Ricardos” (2021) and Jeremy Strong in “The Apprentice” (2024).
Pearce may not have the most screen time, but he is memorable in every frame. O’Connell has the more obvious breakout narrative and, as the story’s beating heart, the showier dramatic arc.
Two performances from one film can coexist comfortably in an awards campaign, but they can also create a strategic problem. The distributor must establish why both actors are essential without letting voters perceive one as stealing oxygen from the other.
Guy Pearce as Rupert Murdoch and Jack O’Connell as Larry Lamb in “Ink”
Netflix
There is also a screenplay story here, and a recent precedent worth studying.
Graham is adapting his own acclaimed play, which puts “Ink” in the adapted screenplay conversation and on a path that “One Night in Miami” walked in 2020. That film, too, launched at Venice and Kemp Powers turned his own stage work into an adapted screenplay nomination while the movie also landed an acting nod for Leslie Odom Jr. A playwright translating his own material, a festival launch and a performance the industry embraces: the template is right there.
But Netflix will look to check even more boxes.
Beyond the two actors, “Ink” is built to contend in the crafts. Its production design, by Carson McColl and Gareth Pugh, rebuilds a vanished Fleet Street. Fin Oates cuts the film with a fragmented, kinetic energy that recalls the associative style Hank Corwin brought to Adam McKay’s “The Big Short” and “Vice.” Johnnie Burn, the Oscar-winning sound designer of “The Zone of Interest,” lends the film one of the most decorated ears in the business. And composer Daniel Pemberton supplies an original score with the propulsion Boyle’s movies demand, capping a bombastic year that also includes “Project Hail Mary.”
Netflix has the resources to make all of those cases.
The larger question is whether the company has the bandwidth. Its fall slate is stacked, with “La Bola Negra,” “The Adventures of Cliff Booth,” “Possible Love,” “Gentle Monster” and “The Mosquito Bowl” all angling for the same oxygen. “Ink” will have to compete not only against rival distributors but against Netflix’s own contenders for screeners, headlines, events, Q & As and voter attention. The Venice-Telluride-Toronto sequence helps enormously, giving the movie the sort of early critical footprint that can turn an awards campaign into a sustained conversation.
And Boyle’s presence adds another narrative. As the Oscar-winning filmmaker behind “Slumdog Millionaire,” he brings such a distinctive visual and kinetic signature that the fall circuit was an obvious place for the film to bow.
The James Graham connection gives “Ink” a larger cultural context. His work has repeatedly mined the intersection of power, institutions and public life, from politics to journalism. “Ink” arrives in a media environment in which the questions surrounding Murdoch’s influence feel less like history than an origin story for the world audiences inhabit now.
That resonance is the film’s best weapon, and the campaign will not have to manufacture it.
“Ink” argues that we are all still living in the paper they printed.
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