AMC renews Fear the Walking Dead for season 7, complete with video

The Walking Dead boss Scott M. Gimple gives fans a taste of what’s next, from the new episodes of the main show to the growing number of spinoffs.

When The Walking Dead first premiered back in 2010, I don’t think the creator, showrunners, or anyone else involved could have foreseen the success the franchise would see in the coming years. Sure, the flagship series has hit a few bumps along the way and struggled to find its footing at times, but it’s still going strong after a decade, with two spinoffs on the air and more to come, and that’s very impressive.

Speaking with The Hollywood Reporter, The Walking Dead chief content officer Scott M. Gimple talked about the future of the franchise as it continues to move beyond the main show, which is ending with its upcoming 11th season.

The second spin-off series, The Walking Dead: World Beyond, just concluded its first season. While the show, about the first generation to grow up amid the zombie apocalypse, got off to a slow start, things picked up by the end, finishing with some big reveals about Hope (Alexa Mansour) and Huck (Annet Mahendru), a secret genius and an undercover CRM agent respectively.

“The very, very beginning. We knew who Huck was and who Hope was, even though Hope didn’t quite know who she was,” Gimple said. “This was before we even put pen to paper. It’s been very gratifying that people were so shocked by that turn. This happened on The Walking Dead, too: you’re aware of it for so long that [these twists are] coming, and you’re so used to it from a creator’s angle that you forget that we did this because it’s a huge story turn that changes everything. You come to take it for granted because you’ve been living with it for so long. But this one was from the very, very beginning.”

I certainly didn’t see that twist coming. The show did a great job of drawing our attention elsewhere, so the reveal that Huck was working for the shadowy CRM came as a shock. World Beyond is the third show in the franchise, so it’s hard to keep people surprised, but they pulled it off!

One of the big questions with World Beyond is whether we might learn something about what happened to Rick Grimes (Andrew Lincoln), who was airlifted off the main show in a CRM helicopter back in season 9. Gimple was…ambivalent about that. “What’s so cool about next season is how different it is to this past season,” he said. “This season was on the road. It was a quest. Now, these characters exist in a few different worlds that are completely different from one another with such a high contrast. A couple of those worlds will tell us a lot about the Civic Republic and the Civic Republic Military storyline. It’s going to fill out that world. We will see a lot more of that world in different places.”

"But I also want to say that this isn’t the entirety of The Walking Dead mythology. It exists with all sorts of mythology, and this is just one of them, but it’s a mythology that clearly touches on the Rick movies. I’m not at all saying that Rick is going to be hanging out where [Hope and her father] are [in season two]. That isn’t going to happen. But you are going to see places that … who knows, Rick may have been. Or at least find out about the civilization that he’s now entangled with."

I don’t care if he’s not in the series, I just want to hear his name or see any sign of him! That will be enough to hold me over until his standalone movies come along.

Speaking of which, Gimple assures fans that those films are coming. “[W]e’re very much continuing forward,” he said. “I’m working on it with Mr. Lincoln and [Walking Dead co-creator Robert Kirkman]. We have a whole bunch of people cranking away on it. It’s a movie. Movies are different. Movies go through a very different process than television. I’m confident at the end of the day, it’s going to be something special.”

And Rick isn’t the only old favorite we’re liking to see in the movies. Speaking about them to ComicBook.com, Gimple said viewers “should pay attention to the way that Michonne (Danai Gurira) left the [original Walking Dead] show.” After discovering that Rick was still alive, Michonne helps a pair of strangers — Aiden (Breeda Wool) and Bailey (Andrew Bachelor, aka King Back) — and then joined a caravan of migrants, presumably to search for her man.

“There’s something going on there,” Gimple hinted. “Yeah, King Bach was there. I’m very grateful to him. We probably haven’t seen the end of him either. It was King Bach for a reason. But that was a pretty big group she was with.” How mysterious.

More immediately, we’re getting six additional episodes of the recently concluded season 10, which will air in February of next year. According to Gimple, they’ll be more “intimate” than what we’re used to.

"Season 10C wrapped very recently, this past week. The shows are amazing. There’s a lot of circumstance that was put on these episodes. Things everyone is dealing with with the pandemic. But the way [showrunner Angela Kang] charted these stories with the writers, and the way they came together and worked so hard and so quickly and yet crafted some of the best stories we’ve had in a long while … they’re just intimate. Initially, I was describing them as “acoustic,” but they aren’t. It turns out it’s more like seeing your favorite band at your favorite bar. They are not a step down in any way as far as the scale — at least, they don’t feel that way. They feel more intimate because they are more [character] focused. There are just a couple of characters per episode, or a few characters per episode, and that makes them special."

One of those characters will be Negan’s wife Lucille, for whom he named his infamous bat. Yep, we’re getting a Negan origin episode, with Lucille played by Jeffrey Dean Morgan’s real-life wife Hilarie Burton. I’m still not over that genius casting decision and I’m counting down the days until we see the husband-wife duo onscreen!

Maybe we’ll even get a glimpse of season 11 villains the Commonwealth, an advanced civilization (well, advanced for the zombie apocalypse, anyway) the gang will be dealing with in the final stretch of the show. Showrunner Angela Kang shared a sneak peak of them on her Instagram:

“You ready to see what they’ve been up to?” Of course we are!

Last but not least, Gimple provided an update on spinoff Fear The Walking Dead, which aired its mid-season finale just a couple of weeks ago. That episode actually wasn’t intended to serve as the mid-season finale, but given how the pandemic has slowed down the production process, the show did what it had to do.

But worry not, the series is currently in production again, and we’ll get to see how the rest of the season plays out sooner rather than later. And while they’re churning out the rest of season 6, AMC just announced that the series has been officially renewed for season 7!

Rest assured, The Walking Dead franchise is here to stay!

To stay up to date on everything fantasy, science fiction, and WiC, follow our all-encompassing Facebook page and sign up for our exclusive newsletter.

Get HBO, Starz, Showtime, and MORE for FREE with a no-risk, 7-day free trial of Amazon Channels

h/t SYFY Wire