Has Peaky Blinders been canceled or renewed for season 6?

Peaky Blinders season 6 starts filming but showrunner Steven Knight has bad news for fans

A scene from Peaky Blinders season 6

Update (January 21st): A few days after it was revealed that the upcoming Peaky Blinders season 6 will be the show’s last, series creator Steven Knight officially announced that a Peaky Blinders movie is in the works.

“We are in development,” he told Deadline of the film. “It’s a fully formed idea and it has a beginning, middle and end. And I think it’s going to be a fitting conclusion to the story told so far.”

The movie, however, won’t be the end of the Peaky Blinders franchise, as Knight revealed that the film will actually introduce new stories. “From it, there will be things I don’t really call spinoffs, but there will be other TV shows that I hope will come out of [it], that will continue to tell the story of this part of society.”

When asked what made him decide against the originally planned seventh season, Knight replied: “COVID came along, and we lost a year of production. So we put our heads together and thought that it would be a good idea to do a movie instead of doing series seven.”

Original Story (January 19th): Production for Peaky Blinders season 6 has officially started, but the new season will be the show’s last.

After the enforced production delay due to the COVID-19 pandemic, series creator and writer Steven Knight announced on Monday that filming on Peaky Blinders season 6 is now underway. Though Knight didn’t offer any plot details about the final season of the period crime drama, he did say in a statement that “it will be the best series of all,” believing that the show’s amazing fans will love it.

While the TV series will be coming to an end, Knight said that “the story will continue in another form.” This was seconded by Knight’s fellow executive producer Caryn Mandabach who said in a statement that “the world of Peaky Blinders will most definitely live on.”

Primarily set in Birmingham, England, Peaky Blinders tells the story of Tommy Shelby (Cillian Murphy) and his notorious family’s rise to prominence and power in the aftermath of World War I. Season 5 ended with a cliffhanger that saw Tommy putting a gun to his own head as his dead wife encouraged him to end all his suffering. The season-ender also revealed that fan-favorite Alfie Solomon (Tom Hardy) is still alive.

The news that Peaky Blinders season 6 will be the show’s last shocked a lot of fans, as Knight said ahead of season 5 that the show would end after three more seasons. “My ambition is to make it a story of a family between two wars,” he said (via RadioTimes) in May 2018. “So I’ve wanted to end it with the first air raid siren in Birmingham in 1939. It’ll take three more series to reach that point.”

But more than shock, the announcement that the show is ending made viewers upset. Below are some fan reactions to the show’s cancellation:

In 2019, Knight told Entertainment Weekly that a Peaky Blinders film was “certainly a strong possibility,” so it won’t be surprising if the story of the Shelbys will continue in movie form after the series wraps up.

In the same year, Knight also mentioned in an interview with NME that they had been thinking about spin-offs, noting that he’s also interested in doing something with the Second World War.

Launched on BBC Two in 2013, Peaky Blinders quickly became one of the most popular dramas of the channel. But in 2019, the British series made the transition to BBC One for its season 5. Elsewhere across the world, the show is available to stream on Netflix.

Peaky Blinders season 6 doesn’t have a release date yet.

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Sources: ComicBook.com, Deadline, Yahoo! Entertainment