With the release of each new Walking Dead show, the series’ shared zombie universe has expanded. Fear the Walking Dead showed its origins; World Beyond will explore its aftermath. And, when the first Walking Dead movie is released sometime in the future, it sounds like it’ll reveal more about the world than ever before.
“We are going to continue to tell Rick’s story, and we are going to discover so much of the world through that story,” Scott M. Gimple, former Walking Dead showrunner, and current “franchise chief content officer,” told Entertainment Weekly. “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 widescreen—we’re going to be filling that screen with a brand new world.”
Rick, played by Andrew Lincoln, had been the star of The Walking Dead since the show began in 2010. After his character left the show in 2018, news instantly broke that his story would continue in a film. However, after a short teaser was released this past July, there haven’t been many updates. Gimple says that’s because bringing The Walking Dead to the big screen is no easy task. The script is still being worked on and there is no director yet, but the film will be a proper theatrical movie.
[referenced url=” thumb=” title=” excerpt=”]
“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 said. “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.”
And though there had been rumours the film might go onto AMC shortly after its release or have a smaller theatrical release, Gimple’s interview sure makes it sound like it’s going to get a proper, wide, theatrical release with a traditional home video window and everything.
Read much more in what EW is teasing as a multiple-part interview with Gimple.