Tommy Shelby walked off your screen four years ago and into a kind of limbo. The Peaky Blinders series finale in 2022 left a lot of loose ends and a lot of fans feeling like they’d been handed a cliffhanger wrapped in a flat cap. The promised film took its time. And now, finally, Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man is on Netflix, it’s the number one movie in 50 countries, and 25.3 million people watched it in the first three days.
That’s not a sequel finding its audience. That’s pent-up demand detonating.
What You’re Actually Getting
The setup: Birmingham, 1940. WWII is hammering the city, Tommy Shelby is returning from a self-imposed exile, and the stakes have somehow gotten even bigger. Nazis are involved. Family is at risk. Tommy must face his demons and decide what he’s willing to burn down to survive.
If that sounds like familiar Peaky Blinders territory, it is. Writer Steven Knight isn’t reinventing the formula. What he’s doing is giving the story a proper ending, which is more than the Season 6 finale managed to pull off. Roger Ebert’s site called it “a firmer sense of closure,” though with the caveat that it “offers its characters far less grace.” NPR’s review noted that it works better if you’ve watched all six seasons, which is fair warning if you’re planning to jump in cold.
The short version: Tommy Shelby gets his sendoff. Whether it’s the sendoff he deserved is a matter of what you came for.
The Numbers Tell a Story
Here’s the angle that doesn’t get enough attention: The Immortal Man debuted March 20, 2026, and knocked Alan Ritchson’s sci-fi action film War Machine off the number one spot. War Machine had been holding the top position for over two weeks. Tommy Shelby displaced it in a weekend.
Twenty-five million views in three days makes it Netflix’s third-best release of 2026 so far. It’s holding number one in Argentina, Canada, Austria, Germany, the United Kingdom, and about 45 other countries. This is a film that performed like an event.
That tells you something about IP loyalty in streaming. People who watched Peaky Blinders for six seasons did not forget it. They waited nearly four years for this, and when it showed up on a Tuesday, they cleared their evening.
The “Season Condensed Into a Movie” Problem
The criticism showing up consistently in reviews is one that plagues a lot of these TV-to-film continuations: there’s simply too much world to compress. One IMDB user put it plainly: “this movie seemed like a series’s season condensed into a 2 hour format.” Characters who were central to the show get mentioned and tossed aside. The dynamics that made the series work, the slow burn of loyalties and betrayals, don’t have room to breathe in a two-hour runtime.
It’s a structural problem that doesn’t have a clean solution. Either you make a film that requires six seasons of homework to emotionally land, or you make something accessible to newcomers that feels thin to longtime fans. The Immortal Man leans toward the former, which is probably the right call given who actually showed up to watch it.
The Prague Reporter noted the plot “moves in a fairly straight line from Nazi involvement to resolution,” which sounds like a polite way of saying the complexity that defined the series got trimmed to fit the format.
Cillian Murphy, Still Carrying the Whole Thing
What’s not in question: Cillian Murphy as Tommy Shelby is one of those rare casting decisions where the character and the actor become genuinely inseparable. He won an Oscar for Oppenheimer in 2024. He came back for this anyway. That’s not a contractual obligation. That’s someone who believed the story wasn’t finished.
The performance is apparently worth showing up for even when the script is merely good rather than great. Most reviews agree on that, even the lukewarm ones.
Should You Watch It?
If you watched the show: yes, obviously. You already know this. You probably watched it opening weekend.
If you never watched Peaky Blinders: the six seasons are all on Netflix, and they’re worth your time. It’s one of the better crime dramas of the last decade, and the pacing in the early seasons is genuinely excellent. Watch those first. The Immortal Man will mean more. NPR’s review makes exactly this point: “You can watch The Immortal Man all by itself, but if you’re uninitiated in what’s come before, you shouldn’t.”
If you dropped off somewhere around Season 4 or 5 because life got complicated: you have context. Jump back in, marathon the rest, then watch the film. You’ll be in the same position as most of the 25 million people who already did this.
The Broader Picture
The Immortal Man is part of a trend that streaming hasn’t fully figured out yet: what happens when a beloved TV show ends but the fanbase isn’t ready to let go? The answer, apparently, is a film continuation. It’s not always elegant, but when the original property had 50-plus hours of character development behind it, audiences show up regardless.
It’s worth comparing this to what’s happening in gaming right now. The nostalgia economy is working overtime in every entertainment category. The Great Meme Reset of 2026 we covered recently isn’t just about internet culture. It’s about people reaching back for stories and characters they already trust, in a moment when there’s not a lot of new stuff earning that trust fast enough.
And on the gaming side, Mega Man Star Force coming back after 18 years is the same instinct, different medium. People want to return to things that meant something. Tommy Shelby meant something.
The Immortal Man isn’t perfect. It probably couldn’t be, given everything it was trying to do. But 25.3 million views in three days is not a fluke. That’s a fanbase that stuck around, and a film that gave them enough to make the wait feel worthwhile. Whether that’s sufficient is something only you can answer, preferably while wearing a flat cap.
Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man is streaming now on Netflix. The full series is also available. All six seasons. Start there if you haven’t. You’ve got the weekend.
Sources: Variety, CBR, RogerEbert.com, NPR, IMDB
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