back. He’s been spotted by multiple witnesses on the leafy streets of suburban New Jersey, sneaking cigarettes and hijacking a Mister Softee ice cream truck.

Try not to pass out from excitement.

On Oct. 1, The Many Saints of Newark, a feature-length prequel to The Sopranos, will make its debut in theaters.

Over the course of the original HBO series’ 86 episodes, Tony Soprano, played brilliantly by the late James Gandolfini, emerged as one of the most influential characters in the history of American television: a middle-aged, SUV-driving, jaw-busting head of a New Jersey crime family who’s anxious about the future of his business and suffering from periodic panic attacks—often triggered by a proximity to red meat.

A dinner scene in The Many Saints of Newark.

 finale, sitting in a Jersey diner, munching on onion rings and listening to Journey on the jukebox when the camera cut to black silence midsong, midscene. The unresolved ending touched off howls of confusion from viewers who demanded to know what had just happened. Had Tony been whacked? It didn’t help that David Chase, the show’s darkly humorous, gnomic creator, declined to spell things out any further.

With The Many Saints of Newark, HBO superfans have reason to be skeptical: When it comes to spinoffs and sequels, nobody would confuse HBO with the Marvel Cinematic Universe. From the cheesy Sex and the City movies, the embarrassing Entourage film, and the bewildering Deadwood feature, the network’s world-expanding potential has often fizzled.

 Director Alan Taylor and creator/writer/producer David Chase on the set.

Photographer: Barry Wetcher

Not this time. Over two action-packed hours, Chase and co-writer Lawrence Konner sketch out much of the Soprano family roots in America. The movie begins in the titular city in 1967, where young Tony (William Ludwig) is a dough-faced little hellion who gets suspended from school for running a gambling ring.

With his father away in prison, he falls deeper under the spell of Dickie Moltisanti (Alessandro Nivola), a member of the DiMeo crime family who runs the local numbers racket. As tensions rise between Newark’s Black and Italian residents, the Mafia’s hold on its illicit enterprises is tenuous. One night, Tony looks out his window, and his neighborhood is on fire.

From left: Billy Magnussen as Paulie Walnuts, Jon Bernthal as Johnny Soprano, Corey Stoll as Junior Soprano (in back), John Magaro as Silvio Dante, Ray Liotta as “Hollywood Dick” Moltisanti, and Alessandro Nivola as Dickie Moltisanti.

Photographer: Barry Wetcher

Following the Newark riots, the Soprano family decamps to the suburbs, and the movie jumps forward to the 1970s. Tony, now a teenager (played by Michael Gandolfini, son of James), is a linebacker on his high school football team. Things at home are rocky, and as he wavers between a future life as a “civilian” or one in crime, Tony turns to Dickie for guidance. But Harold McBrayer (Leslie Odom Jr.), one of Moltisanti’s former employees, decides to seize control of Newark’s numbers racket, and a war erupts. Tony’s shot at a straight life gets caught up in the carnage.

One of the movie’s ironies is that on the same day The Many Saints of Newark opens in theaters, it will also be available for free on the premium version of HBO Max—part of AT&T’s broader effort to lure more subscribers using Warner Bros. feature films as bait.

And yet for decades, throughout his successful career as a TV writer, Chase wanted nothing more than to leave the small screen and create movies that ticket-paying customers would experience communally in a hushed and darkened theater.

Now, AT&T has gone and jammed the return of the outsize Soprano clan back into home television sets. Just when Chase thought he was out of TV, they pulled him back in.