More stars were announced for the upcoming Peaky Blinders film this week, with none other than Barry Keoghan joining the production yesterday in an as-yet-unrevealed role.
Keoghan's presence adds an extra layer of prestige to the film — he was nominated for an Oscar last year, joining a cast led by new Best Actor winner Cillian Murphy — but the Peaky Blinders film still feels like it has a lot of challenges ahead of it, especially since, as a film based on a TV show, it's going against the current.
If Peaky Blinders had been a movie and it had been planned to be a TV show, it would have been a different story. Shows based on movies are definitely the new hot trend. At the end of the year, you'll be hard pressed to find a better show than Amazon Prime's Mr & Mrs Smith. The series turned the shallowness of filmmaking into a long, warm and deep exploration of what marriage is. This year's Fargo was equally great. It was Noah Hawley's experiment in twisting and subverting the Coen brothers' book as much as possible, while still keeping the basic formula.
Shows like this succeed because they allow room to thoroughly examine the premise. In other words, they did what the TV show Peaky Blinders did: in 36 hours they traced the course of Birmingham over 15 years after the war, telling a story as ambitious as Our Friends in the North while simultaneously hitting the necessary genre beats. It seems incredibly arrogant to think that a two-hour film, even with a bigger budget, could top that.
Also, have you seen the Luther movie? That was a mess. You were tied down for a feature length movie, had no idea what to do and ended up chasing your tail until you collapsed from exhaustion. Similarly, the Downton Abbey movies were so pointless that they started to feel like a ploy to convince your grandma to spend a few hours somewhere warm. Why would Peaky Blinders try to copy that?
The trappings of TV-to-film can seduce even the best works — Vince Gilligan's El Camino is a fine, if structurally a bit uneven, short film in its own right — but it's destined to forever be in the shadow of Breaking Bad, a generational feat that couldn't have been achieved in any other medium.
TV has always had a weakness for the silver screen. Anyone who lived through the bad old days of On the Bus spinoff Holiday on the Bus knows the familiar sinking feeling that comes when a long-running show tries to shoehorn itself into a new format. Character moments are sacrificed for storyline. Rhythms are thrown off. The extra money ends up diminishing the appeal of the original. It's more of a throwback to the days when TVs were small and people went to the cinema, but it was often strange to see the characters on the big screen.
At least Peaky Blinders doesn't have to contend with this – it's a show starring a movie star surrounded by other movie stars – but here's my take: if the Peaky Blinders movies are truly successful and surpass everything the TV show achieved, they should be left alone for 25 years.
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That's what happened with The Fugitive starring Harrison Ford. It started out as a TV show in the 1960s, but decades of neglect gave audiences the space to set the original aside and embrace the new version. And it worked: the film version was nominated multiple times for an Oscar, The third highest-grossing film in the world in 1993The same goes for The Untouchables, which allowed the original (a 1950s TV show) time to rot before being powerfully revived by Sean Connery and Robert De Niro.
Then, of course, there's Mission: Impossible. Tom Cruise had to let memories of the 1960s original fade before reimagining it as a full-throttle action extravaganza. And it worked, because there are few films out there quite like Mission: Impossible.
So that's what Peaky Blinders needs to do. Put the film on hold, wait 30 years, set it in space, and cast Timothée Chalamet as Tommy Shelby, a laser-gun-toting, base-jumping cowboy. This is what people really want to see.
