After starring as Rick Grimes on AMC's The Walking Dead for close to a decade, Andrew Lincoln departed the series early last season in a storyline which found the character sacrificing his life to save his community and friends from a massive horde of walkers; but, Grimes wasn't actually dead and it was revealed that he had been rescued by a mysterious group and taken off to parts unknown in a helicopter. It was then announced that Rick Grimes would return in a trilogy of movies set in the world of The Walking Dead, but beyond a short teaser released at San Diego Comic-Con in 2019, we haven't heard all that much about these films.
Thankfully, The Walking Dead chief content officer Scott M. Gimple recently spoke with Entertainment Weekly and spilled a few details about the upcoming Walking Dead movie. Currently, the script is in the process of being refined. "I don’t want to say much more than that," Gimple said. "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 also confirmed that the movie will find Rick Grimes challenged by a whole new world.
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.
Seeing as how this will be a theatrical film (and Gimple did say that it will be screened in theaters rather than airing on AMC), we can expect everything to be on a larger scale. "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," Gimple teased. "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." To be honest, I've largely given up on the TV series, but I'd be lying if I wasn't somewhat excited about this trilogy of Walking Dead movies. Here's hoping that they really are something new.