Fox News has declined to hand over footage for Danny Boyle’s Ink, and the director has now said so out loud. The film follows a young Australian publisher who buys a struggling London paper and turns it into a headline machine. Such stories tend to age into a tidy history lesson. Boyle wanted this one to land in the present day, which meant borrowing pictures from the people who inherited the business.

Asking a media empire for pictures to decorate a film about that same empire sounds bold, and the answers came back in two very different flavors.

Fox News refused to supply footage that Danny Boyle wanted for the closing section of Ink. The Netflix drama follows Rupert Murdoch buying The Sun in 1969, then jumps to today in its epilogue. That material was meant to bridge the decades.

“Fox News obviously declined footage that we wanted to use,” Boyle said on The Town with Matt Belloni.

He then added, “that showed this seed point arriving at where we are now.”

The trouble began with a surprise act of kindness. Boyle explained on The Town with Matt Belloni that the son granted several permissions because the family liked the stage play, so the paper could keep the name The Sun instead of something like The Globe. Later requests for other headlines in the epilogue were declined. Among those headlines was The Truth, the Hillsborough front page that Kelvin McKenzie has apologized for many times.

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While Fox kept its archives locked, Netflix opened its doors, and the finished film now has a calendar.

Ink opens in select theatres on December 11, 2026, according to Variety. Netflix then streams it for home audiences on January 8, 2027. Before that, the film opened at the 83rd Venice International Film Festival, competing for the Golden Lion, and then traveled to the Toronto International Film Festival for its Canadian premiere. The mid-December slot places the drama in the thick of Oscar season.

Adapted from James Graham’s Tony-nominated play, the film stars Guy Pearce as Murdoch and Jack O’Connell as editor Larry Lamb, with Claire Foy as Jules Davies. Cameras rolled across West Yorkshire, using Shipley, Saltaire, and Bradford to stand in for late-1960s publishing towns. Netflix also unveiled a first image of Pearce in character. Viewers will get every bit of that period detail, but the Fox News clips Danny Boyle asked for will not be part of it.

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What are your thoughts on Ink reaching Netflix without the Fox footage Danny Boyle wanted? Let us know in the comments.