The Walking Dead is about to go through some big changes. Season 11 (and the mini-season 10C next February) will be the finale of the core show, though the story will continue in a number of spinoffs. One will follow Norman Reedus’ Daryl and Melissa McBride’s Carol, another will be an anthology series called Tales of the Walking Dead, and Fear the Walking Dead and The Walking Dead: World Beyond have further seasons to come, too. But one project that fans are particularly interested in is the feature film trilogy starring Andrew Lincoln’s Rick Grimes.
Other than the fact that they appear to take place in and around Philadelphia, we don’t know much about these movies. World Beyond is confirmed to be setting up the story, though, which will center on the Civic Republic Military that captured Rick and begin to shed light on what characters being designated ‘A’ or ‘B’ means, and fans have theorized that the pics could see a vaccine being developed for the walker pathogen.
That may yet happen, but according to sources close to WGTC – the same ones who said that Percy Jackson is being rebooted as a streaming series and Ben Affleck is returning as Batman in The Flash – the path to get there won’t be easy. The plot is a closely guarded secret, but we’ve been told that there’s precious little optimism planned for these movies, with the general tone set to be dark, depressing and gritty.
Further details are unclear, but The Walking Dead creative head Scott Gimple discussed the trilogy during the 2020 New York Comic Con and said:
“[World Beyond] obviously serves as an introduction to the organization/civilization that Rick has gotten somehow tied up in, in some way. Rick Grimes kinda takes care of himself. He’s pretty good at that sort of thing. But it does look like his situation is going to be challenged in some kind of pronounced way. That I will say.”
Additional info is fairly thin on the ground, but it seems that their release might be a long way away yet and nothing firm has been decided. In an interview with EW earlier this year, Gimple refused to be drawn on specifics, stating:
“I can’t even give you a definitive thing because we really are playing around with it a little bit now. We have a terrific area and direction we’re moving in, but we’re playing around with various aspects of it. We have a couple of different plans that we’re going with depending on a couple of different factors we have to deal with on everything from story to product aspects. There have been a lot of different aspects to it in terms of timing that are pretty much coming into rapid focus right now. I would say the past year in a lot of ways has been R&D on a lot of aspects of it.”
The only hint of a release date is that World Beyond is going to get two seasons, so if the second run airs in late 2021, we may not see The Walking Dead on the big screen until 2022 or 2023. Oh well, at last theaters will probably be back open by then.
