The Walking Dead: Rick Grimes movies will be rated R

The Walking Dead is known for its zombie-on-human violence (and human-on-human violence), and it sounds like the upcoming Rick Grimes movies won’t let up.

Andrew Lincoln stopped playing Rick Grimes when he departed The Walking Dead in season 9, carried away by a Civic Republic Military (CRM) helicopter to parts unknown. But AMC has confirmed that he will return to fighting zombies in a series of movies! And if rumors can be believed, the films won’t let up on the gore and violence The Walking Dead is famous for, with the lot of them earning “R” ratings from the MPAA!

The Walking Dead and its spinoffs are all rated TV-MA, meaning they may be unsuitable for those under the age of 17. An R rating sounds about right for a Walking Dead movie. What we didn’t want is a PG-13 rating with watered-down violence to appeal to a wider audience on the big screen.

The rating report comes from entertainment sleuth Daniel Richtman over on his Patreon. Although he’s not infallible, Richtman’s scoops are pretty reliable.

And in any case, AMC chief content officer Scott Gimple has previously said that the Rick movies wouldn’t be for the kiddies, drawing comparisons between Rick’s return and Hugh Jackman’s final performance as Wolverine’s in Logan. “You didn’t have to watch every X-Men movie to enjoy that,” Gimple told ComicBook.com last year.

"Rick has a history and the history will be present within him and it’ll be a big part of who he is, but it’s likely going to be a very different Rick that we see as well. New audiences will be like, ‘Oh, that’s the guy. I want to discover that past history.’ We who know it so well, it’s like, ‘Oh crap, that’s the thing that’s weighing on him from the past.’ You gotta invite both those people, which we try to do with the shows."

But what will Rick be doing when we catch up with him? It’s presumed that he’s now a member of the Civic Republic, possibly even high up in the ranks. But as we learned in The Walking Dead: World Beyond, the organization isn’t all what it’s cracked up to be, so if this is the case, he’s hardly out of danger.

Production on the Rick Grimes movies — they don’t have official titles yet — was supposed to commence in 2019, but the coronavirus pandemic delayed things. Hopefully, it’ll start up in Spring of this year. In the meantime, Andrew Lincoln channeled his inner Scrooge in a theatre performance of A Christmas Carol.

It’s still going to be a while before we see the first Walking Dead film. At least we can relax knowing AMC has plenty of other zombie action on the way between now and then.

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