In the wake of the success of Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man, series creator Steven Knight has explained why they decided to wrap up Thomas Shelby’s story with a movie instead of greenlighting a Season 7. Knight, who has written and co-produced the Netflix feature, noted that a larger scale suited the final chapter of the British crime drama much more than a small-screen adaptation.
Steven Knight on why Peaky Blinders Season 7 turned into a movie
The veteran screenwriter recently stated that, given how the series’ narrative had unfolded so far, ending the story with a movie automatically appeared to be the right choice.
“It restricts, and it expands, really. I mean, the screen’s bigger, the budget’s bigger,” Steven Knight told MovieWeb. “The budget is always never quite enough, you know, but it was bigger. We could blow stuff up in the simplistic sense, but sometimes, when you’re having to cope with the budget, and you can’t blow things up, you have to come up with creative solutions, which can be great. But with this, we were able to really…it’s almost like this is where we’ve been heading all along.”
Knight added that the team “wanted to make it a film because our fans have been the engine of this thing,” and showcasing Thomas Shelby’s conclusive story on the big screen would allow people to “watch it together and communicate, not virtually, but really.”
Moreover, for Peaky Blinders lead Cillian Murphy, replacing a potential Season 7 of the series with a movie posed multiple challenges. “If we were going to make a film, I really felt like I had to really justify its existence and exist as a piece of cinema on its own, while adding to this to the 36 hours of television. But at the same time be, you know, be a piece of standalone cinema so that you didn’t have to…you wouldn’t have had to watch the show,” he remarked.
However, everything seemed to have worked out in the end as Knight’s script instantly won over Murphy. Audiences and critics have also approved of Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man, as evidenced by its 93% Tomatometer and 89% Popcornmeter scores on Rotten Tomatoes.
Originally reported by Apoorv Rastogi on ComingSoon.net.
