The prophecy is fulfilled. Six seasons, years of waiting, and more fan petitions than anyone cared to count, and Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man has finally landed on Netflix.
Written by series creator Steven Knight and directed by Tom Harper, the film drops Tommy Shelby into 1940 Birmingham at the height of the Blitz. He’s been living as a recluse, hollowed out by grief and guilt, until he gets dragged back into the fray. The hook is a genuinely clever one: his estranged son Duke, now running the Peaky Blinders, has been pulled into a Nazi plot to flood Britain with counterfeit currency and trigger economic collapse. Tommy has to come back. He always has to come back.
The cast around Cillian Murphy is worth noting. Barry Keoghan plays Duke, Tim Roth steps in as the film’s cold-blooded antagonist, Rebecca Ferguson takes on a dual role as twin sisters, and Stephen Graham shows up as a criminal kingpin with serious Alfie Solomons energy. Familiar faces from the original series fill out the rest.
25 Million Views. 50 Countries. One Flat Cap.
Whatever the critics say, the audience showed up. The Immortal Man debuted at number one globally on Netflix, holding the top spot in 50 countries, including the UK, Germany, and Canada, pulling in 25.3 million views and 48.1 million hours watched in its opening days.
Those aren’t just big numbers. They’re a statement. Rick Lyman, TV and film consultant, points out that this wasn’t a nostalgia bump driven by casual curiosity—it reflects a genuine, deeply loyal global fanbase that the original series cultivated over nearly a decade on Netflix. People weren’t just checking in. They were invested.
By any commercial measure, this is one of Netflix’s strongest film debuts of 2026.
What Critics Are Actually Saying
Here’s where it gets interesting. The film holds a 91% on Rotten Tomatoes, but only a 59 on Metacritic. CBR That gap tells a story. Broadly speaking, critics didn’t hate it. But a meaningful number found it falls short of what the franchise, at its best, was capable of.
Murphy’s performance is the one thing almost nobody argues with—RogerEbert.com put it plainly, calling it “Cillian Murphy’s world, and we’re all just living in it.” He’s carried this character across 36 episodes and over a decade, and the craft shows.
The reservations are more structural. The film is visually striking but uneven. Reviewers say it struggles to fully unpack its biggest questions about legacy, memory, and who gets to tell a life’s story. IndieWire argued that the script spends too much energy accounting for absent characters rather than confidently pushing into new territory.
Rick Lyman sees this as a pattern with beloved franchises. Audiences reward the homecoming, but critics hold the return up against the absolute peak.
The Tom Hardy Question Every Fan Is Asking
Let’s address it directly. Tom Hardy does not appear as Alfie Solomons. The character isn’t even mentioned in passing—and that absence has genuinely frustrated a vocal section of the fanbase, with Reddit threads calling it “unacceptable.” TV Guide
What makes it sting more is what Knight revealed afterward. He had developed a Sixth Sense-style twist in which Alfie had actually died on Margate beach back in Season 4 — meaning every subsequent scene between Tommy and Alfie was Tommy seeing a ghost. Knight ultimately scrapped it. Screen Rant
That is a bold, fascinating, deeply divisive idea. It would have reframed years of the show in a single reveal and leaned hard into Tommy’s psychological deterioration. Whether it would have worked is genuinely debatable. That it existed at all—and was left on the cutting-room floor—will fuel fan discussion for months.
So, Did It Stick the Landing?
Tommy dies on his own terms. Mortally wounded, he asks Duke to end it, and goes quietly — reciting the first line of a poem, at peace for what feels like the first time. It’s not ambiguous. It’s not a setup for more. It’s a full stop.
That said, the franchise itself isn’t finished — a sequel series set in post-WWII Birmingham is confirmed, with Knight teasing that characters from The Immortal Man will carry over. Irish Star The Shelby world continues. Tommy’s chapter simply doesn’t.
The Immortal Man isn’t an ideal film. It carries the weight of too many missing faces, and it occasionally buckles under that pressure. But it’s a better result than most long-running franchises manage when they finally try to close the door.
Rick Lyman’s take is straightforward: the numbers don’t lie. Twenty-five million views in three days, number one in fifty countries–audiences made their verdict clear before the critics had finished filing their reviews. Tommy Shelby still matters. And for a character who’s been living rent-free in the heads of millions since 2013, that’s probably exactly how it should end.
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