Please, Please Do Not Make A Peaky Blinders Movie

Steven Knight is up for writing a Peaky Blinders film after the seventh season is sorted out.

"I love doing it, I love the world," Knight told Joe.ie. "We were originally going to end it with this series but we thought to ourselves, 'So many people are just getting into it it now, it would be such a shame to stop.' We may consider a film at the end of series seven. I think it would be great. I was only starting to think that we could actually go into the Second World War. I was thinking, 'Could we do the war?' We could do the Black Market war, so that's a possibility."

Hmm. Now, I don't mean to be all precious about Peaky Blinders. I'm not going to change.org this one if it ends up happening. It might very well not happen at all. Either outcome is basically fine. But this doesn't feel like a particularly good idea.

For one thing, bodging an extra act onto a pretty neat narrative conceit is an invitation to trouble. As Knight himself has said recently, the original idea of the Peaky Blinders was to follow a family through the tumultuous interwar period, and for things to be rounded off at the start of the Second World War. That helps to keep the thing moving forward, as Knight has admitted he's not got the exact path plotted out yet. If the film's being written, does that mean certain pay-offs will be held back?

We also know that Tommy Shelby will end up redeemed by the end of season seven. So how much further can there be to go when your protagonist has completed his arc? Do you just chuck in a new enemy, or make him go back to his old ways and undermine your original ending? Neither sounds satisfying.

Sure, Peaky Blinders does look quite self-consciously cinematic. Walking down backstreets in slow motion? Nice. Very nice. On television, it's a stylistic watermark. How many films have you seen do that recently, though? It's a television-as-cinema pastiche, not cinema itself.

And some fans have pointed out - always with deep affection, but still - that Peaky Blinders can repeat motifs and plot points, like Tommy using women to get what he wants and Ada doing something selfish. After another three seasons of the same, it could all start to feel tired.

BBC

On top of that, the last Knight-written film that hit cinemas was this year's Matthew

McConaughey and Anne Hathaway turkey Serenity, which he also directed and produced. It was a frequently hilarious jumble of intense earnestness and incredibly literal symbolism - McConaughey is hunting a really big fish he's named 'Justice', a fact which is repeated a few times over the film's course just to make sure you got it - which then yanked probably the most staggeringly stupid narrative twist of recent times halfway through. I'm ruining nothing to tell you that it turns out everything is actually happening in a sentient video game. It only gets more daft from there.

Now, Tommy Shelby's unlikely to be revealed to have been dead and only visible to Haley Joel Osment all along, but clearly writing a potentially open-ended TV series and a self-contained film are very different things, and it's been a while since Knight did a knockout job with the latter.

You might think you want more Peaky Blinders, but the end has to come at some point for everyone - even Tommy Shelby.