Why is Peaky Blinders a movie and not season 7? Cillian Murphy set one condition for the finale
Steven Knight's original blueprint had Tommy Shelby's story running for seven series, from the trenches of the First World War to the doorstep of the Second.
Six series in, the plan changed — and the finale arrived instead as Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man, released on Netflix on 20 March 2026 after a limited cinema run.
So why the switch?
Knight's reasoning: bigger everything
Speaking to MovieWeb in March 2026, Knight was straightforward about the appeal of a film: a bigger screen, a bigger budget, and the ability to stage things a TV schedule can't — he noted, only half-joking, that they could finally blow stuff up rather than write around not being able to.
He'd also told The Playlist he wanted the fans, whom he credits as the engine of the whole thing, watching it together in one room — hence the theatrical release ahead of streaming. The timing helped push the decision too: the pandemic had stalled production for over a year around series 6, and a single feature tied the story off faster than another ten-hour run.
Murphy's condition
Cillian Murphy — by then an Oscar winner for Oppenheimer — didn't just want series 7 with a wider aspect ratio. His bar for doing it at all:
"I really felt like I had to really justify its existence," Murphy told MovieWeb in 2026.
His point: the film had to work as a standalone piece of cinema — something you could watch without having seen a minute of the 36 hours of television — while still adding to them. He said the team spent a few years refining the story to hit both targets before Knight's script finally landed.
What the film format bought them
- A cast built for the big screen — Tim Roth, Rebecca Ferguson, Stephen Graham, and Barry Keoghan (recast as Duke Shelby) joined the returning regulars.
- A tight shoot — filming ran through late 2024, wrapping on 13 December.
- A proper ending — one two-hour story instead of six episodes, set against the Blitz.
- The reception to match — a 93% critics' score on Rotten Tomatoes suggests nobody missed the episode breaks.
Is that really the end?
Of Tommy's screen story in this form, yes — but not of the franchise. Knight has confirmed two further series set in 1953, thirteen years after the film, following Duke and the next generation of Shelbys. Murphy, for his part, has been consistent: the condition was that the film justify itself, and by his own account it did.