It’s been a long two years of waiting since the final batch of episodes aired, but the long-promised standalone Peaky Blinders movie now looks closer than ever.
Creator Steven Knight has confirmed at last that a Peaky Blinders feature film which extends the story of the six-season BBC gangster drama is officially in the works. In fact, it starts shooting in September — and, yes, Oppenheimer star Cillian Murphy will return as the WWI soldier-turned-gangster-turned-businessman-turned-politician Tommy Shelby. There’s no projected release date yet, but honestly this is welcome news indeed for fans who’ve been waiting to get a solid update about the rumored movie ever since the sixth and final season of the hit series debuted on Netflix back in 2022.
I assume the statute of limitations on spoilers has expired at some point in the intervening two years, so just by way of a reminder of where things left off — Tommy’s doctor, remember, had led him to believe that he has an incurable brain tumor. Eventually, though, Tommy finds out that the doctor who diagnosed him is friends with Tommy’s fascist enemy Oswald Mosley and that the diagnosis was simply a ruse to take him out of the picture.
Accordingly, Tommy has a sort of last supper with those closest to him, literally blows up his own mansion with dynamite, and heads out in a Gypsy wagon preparing to off himself. A vision from his daughter saves him and leads him to the truth, ultimately giving the Tommy who was never the same after he came back from the war a chance at what he never really found throughout the series — redemption.
As for what a Peaky Blinders movie might entail, the show’s executive producer Caryn Mandabach has already teased what fans can look forward to on that front. “The decision was to make the movie separate from the TV series, because it’s pretty much clear what’s happening to everybody at the end of the thing,” she said in a Netflix promotional interview. “We’re hopeful to do a movie that will not be at the same time period. It won’t be 1938. We’re gonna skip a few years as we do every year.”
Still, it should go without saying that there’s a lot that this movie is going to need to live up to. How do you even start to sum up a Netflix series like Peaky Blinders? From Murphy’s performance-for-the-ages as the brooding gangster to his snarling yet loyal brother Arthur, the show was packed with iconic, mesmerizing characters. The same goes for the Peaky Blinders women like Polly, Ada, and Lizzie — all of them as tough as steel — as well as for Tom Hardy’s gonzo performance as Tommy’s wild and unruly frenemy Alfie Solomons.
A Peaky Blinders movie, meanwhile, isn’t the only project that Knight has in the works.
On Thursday, we got a first trailer for The Veil, Wright’s new six-episode espionage thriller coming to Hulu just over a month from now. In the new show, which IndieWire previously named as one of the 12 most anticipated of 2024, Elisabeth Moss plays as a covert operative in a cat-and-mouse game that stretches from Istanbul to Paris and London. “One woman has a secret, the other a mission to reveal it before thousands of lives are lost,” reads the show’s official description. “In the shadows, mission controllers at the CIA and French DGSE must put differences aside and work together to avert potential disaster.”
Farther out, Knight is also writing a new Star Wars movie in which Daisy Ridley will reprise her role as Rey and attempt to build a new Jedi Order.
