Rick Grimes movie will take The Walking Dead in wild new directions

There was a time when Andrew Lincoln's character Rick Grimes was the lead on AMC's The Walking Dead, and the idea that the show would go on without him was unthinkable. But then Rick got carried off the show in a black helicopter, taken away to an undisclosed location in the middle of season 9. The setting of the show jumped ahead six Rick-less years and life went on without him.

When Lincoln decided to exit The Walking Dead, it was announced that he would be reprising the role of Rick Grimes in a trilogy of feature films, and most of us assumed these would be TV movies that would air on AMC. That's not the case; last summer it was announced that Universal Pictures will be giving the first Rick Grimes movie a theatrical release.

Speaking with Entertainment Weekly, the Walking Dead franchise's chief content officer Scott M. Gimple offered a status update on the project we'll call THE WALKING DEAD: THE MOVIE, saying that the script is currently being refined.

It’s coming together amazingly, but we’re trying to make this very special for everybody involved and we’re holding our feet to the flames. It’s an incredibly deliberate process right now."

Gimple confirmed that they're still planning to make a trilogy of films, but couldn't give details because they're still "playing around with various aspects" of the project. This is the closest he came to providing information on the story: 

We are going to continue to tell Rick’s story, and we are going to discover so much of the world through that story. Rick will be challenged in different ways that, in some ways, everything that he’s been through has sort of prepared him for. It’s a much larger world than one that he had been operating in, and that was challenging in and of itself. Now things are heightened, and just as we’re going to the movies — and it is the movies proper, suitably wide screen — we’re going to be filling that screen with a brand new world."

Comparing THE MOVIE to the TV show, Gimple said, 

The scale is bigger and the budget is bigger, and it’s The Walking Dead, but heightened, both in the narrative themes, but also in just what we see onscreen. I say heightened, but I should also say it’s also very different. It’s not going to be the exact same thing we saw on television, just larger. We are going in some wild new directions. Movies are a different beast than television. Television is like, boom, we’re done. Movies, to calibrate an hour and a half, two hours is no joke, and it’s been a lot of fun, but it’s a real challenge and we take it very seriously for the fans. We really want to deliver them something special, something worth their trip to the movies. We’re trying to be very deliberate and deliver something new."

A director has not yet been chosen for THE WALKING DEAD: THE MOVIE, and it will be very interesting to see who ends up at the helm. Greg Nicotero, who has directed some of the biggest episodes of the series, would seem to be the obvious choice, but maybe it will end up being someone we're not expecting.

I'm very interested in seeing how these movies will turn out, and in finding out whether or not Rick will be reunited with his family by the end of them.