In June, after the news was confirmed, Murphy said in a statement that “it seems like Tommy Shelby wasn’t finished with me… it is very ratifying to be recollaborating with Steven Knight and Tom Harper on the film version of Peaky Blinders. This one is for the fans.”
Murphy’s a famously private, publicity-averse man, so I wouldn’t read too much into the terse brevity of that statement. The fact that he’s made one at all is probably a sign of irrepressible excitement on his part (or as close to irrepressible excitement as he gets).
Who else is in the film?
Murphy is hardly the only A-list name on the Peaky roster, that one might hope to see in the film, of course. We had Tom Hardy in the series. Anya Taylor-Joy. Stephen Graham, Gangs of London’s Joe Cole and rising star Darryl McCormack. “There are so many people, so many great actors, that we are already, sort of, in conversation with for the film,” Knight said of the talent that may or may not be involved, before following with, intriguingly: “And for whatever follows.”
Frustratingly for fans, Graham was all but absent in the Peaky finale, but pictures published in the Halesowen News and others (long live the local press) show that with shooting now underway in and around Birmingham, Murphy and Graham are both on set.
Other cast members confirmed thus far by Netflix include Dune‘s Rebecca Ferguson, frequent Tarantino collaborator Tim Roth, and the Saltburn Slurper himself, Barry Keoghan. Keoghan has said he’s “excited and nervous” to appear in a franchise many of its fans (and his) have wanted to see him in for a long while—there’s a scruffy smile and a swagger to Keoghan that just feels so right for this world, and with a star rising as rapidly as his, there’ll no doubt be a good few million eyes paying particular attention to his performance.
When will the Peaky Blinders movie come out?
There isn’t a confirmed date at this point — but with production having just kicked off, we could see feature-length Peaky by the end of 2025. Maybe even sooner!
What will the Peaky Blinders movie be about?
It’s still early days, so specific plot details are few and far between. The main series dealt with the devastating aftermath of the First World War, and it sounds as though the film follow-up will careen through into another terrible global conflict. “I know what’s going to happen in those stories, and it’s about a sort of untold story that happened in the Second World War, which Peakys are going to be involved in,” he told the Radio Times.
Knight confirmed as much to Empire as well. “It’s also the end of empire: we enter the Second World War and by the end of it, there is no empire, really. But I… have revised the scope of what it is,” he said. “It will now go into and beyond the Second World War. Because I just think the energy that is out there in the world for this, I want to keep it going, and I want to see how this can progress beyond that.” This might be indicative, too, of further branches that could sprout from the Peaky storytelling tree.
“I think of this sixth series as the end of the beginning,” he continued. Do we smell another cinematic universe?
