For years, fans assumed the cinematic finale of Peaky Blinders would be a victory lap—a stylish, blood-soaked homecoming for Tommy Shelby after the spiritual purgatory of Season 6. Instead, creator Steven Knight has pulled the rug out from under those expectations with a single, devastating detail: this story is not set in 1919. It is set in 1940, and everything that once made the Peaky Blinders powerful may now make them obsolete.
Confirmed alongside the February 5, 2026 theatrical announcement, the upcoming film Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man jumps headlong into the chaos of World War II. Birmingham is no longer just a battleground for rival gangs and political ambition—it is a city under siege, battered by the Luftwaffe during the Blitz. The razor-blade caps that once ruled the streets now exist in a world of air raids, blackouts, and global espionage.
The most unsettling revelation in the synopsis is that Tommy Shelby is “returning from exile.” When audiences last saw him in 1933, Tommy—played by Cillian Murphy—had escaped a false terminal diagnosis and rode away from his empire, leaving his guns, his house, and his old identity behind. That quiet departure has now been recontextualized. It wasn’t a pause. It was a disappearance.
Knight’s wording suggests Tommy has spent years as a ghost, hiding from both the political enemies he accumulated through his dealings with Winston Churchill and from the violence that defined him. But war has a way of dragging men out of hiding. His return in 1940 implies unfinished business—personal, political, and bloody—that can no longer be avoided.
This time jump radically alters the power dynamic. The Peaky Blinders are no longer hungry young kings. They are aging survivors in a world that has moved past street-level brutality into mechanized annihilation. As Knight put it bluntly: “The country is at war, and so, of course, are our Peaky Blinders.” The line lands like a warning. This war won’t play by Tommy’s rules.
The cast reflects that tonal shift. Alongside returning faces like Sophie Rundle, the film introduces a volatile new generation of threats played by Barry Keoghan, Rebecca Ferguson, and Tim Roth, under the direction of Tom Harper. Their presence hints that Tommy may not even recognize the battlefield he’s stepping back into.
That’s why exile may prove to be his deadliest mistake. By walking away, Tommy let the world evolve without him. Now, as bombs fall on Birmingham, he must decide whether to preserve the legacy he built—or finally accept that some empires aren’t meant to survive the future.