The Walking Dead is on its way towards a conclusion, with the mother show ending after an extended 24-episode eleventh season. However, after the old is ushered out, AMC will continue to expand their beloved zombie franchise with a slate of fresh spin-offs, including a “roadshow” style series following Daryl (Norman Reedus) and Carol (Melissa McBride), an anthology series called Tales of the Walking Dead, and a series of movies all about Rick Grimes (Andrew Lincoln). All that and you future seasons of Fear the Walking Dead and The Walking Dead: World Beyond to look forward to.
So AMC’s plans for the franchise are ambitious. Creator Robert Kirkman recently talked about them to Collider.
To start, he explained a bit about Tales of The Walking Dead, which will tell individual stories set at different points along the timeline of the series. “I can say that it’s definitely not going to be 16 episodes,” he said. “t’ll be a smaller season, it’s very much underway… I mean, we’re hopeful that it’ll last past the first season.”
Perhaps these episodes resemble the bonus season 10 episodes we’re watching right now: more focused and character-centric episodes. “There’s not any kind of cap on what we’re doing, we’re just trying to make the best season possible to begin with and see how things go from there,” Kirkman said. “I think it’s a tremendous opportunity to explore many different aspects of the Walking Dead universe, to be able to jump forward and backward in time, and also do things that are much different than what we’ve done on The Walking Dead thus far. So I think it’ll be a really cool show, but we’re gonna see how things go.”
The Carol-and-Daryl show
Then there’s the Daryl-and-Carol spinoff, which is set to air after season 11. Kirkman plays it coy with this one. “All I’ll say is that Carol and Daryl are very much a huge part of the 11th season of the show, and the 11th season of the show is an expanded season that is much longer than past seasons of the show have been,” he said. “And so and everybody is hard at work on that right now, and the Carol and Daryl spinoff is something that I think will ramp up in production closer to the end of the 11th season of the show, which we are very much knee-deep in right now.”
Kirkman also weighed in on whether the franchise could look at how the zombie apocalypse is going in other parts of the world such as France or Spain. Kirkman’s comic series ventured to Europe in the form of a one-shot called The Alien, written by Brian K. Vaughan. It follows Rick’s brother Jeffrey Grimes in Barcelona, Spain.
“I will answer that question by looking silently over my coffee cup,” Kirkman quipped, taking a sip. “It’s entirely possible.” Okay, but is it in the works? “Could be! Could be.”
It must be remembered that this is Robert Kirkman, a man who loves to play games with fans. In the past, he and his artist produced fake covers for the comic to trick fans into thinking the final issue wasn’t actually the final issue. Not only fans were deceived, but retailers too. He’s no stranger to a good tease, either. During an interview last year, he teased the possibility of bringing Clementine — a fan-favorite from the Telltale video game — back in some way or another.
The Rick Grimes movies
All these Walking Dead spin-offs are exciting, but we’re most hyped for the return of fan-favorite Rick Grimes in his first-ever trip to the big screen. Speaking to ComicBook.com, Kirkman shared what he could about them, which isn’t much. “I think that the show is very much an ensemble story and this is very much Rick story,” he explained. “So, I think being able to focus more on Rick as a character and do more with him is really cool”
"I think it’s gonna be a very different kind of Walking Dead story, which is really exciting. You know, when you’re doing something like this you have to make sure that it makes sense for it to be a movie. This isn’t just some kind of expansion of what you’re expecting from the show. This is something that’s gonna be very different but it’s gonna be the Rick Grimes that we all know and love. And I’m very excited for people to finally see it when it’s released in 2032."
Okay, we might be waiting a while, although I don’t think we’ll be waiting until 2032. The first movie is yet to be given a release date.
The Walking Dead season 11
But before all of this, we still have The Walking Dead season 11 to watch. AMC dropped a quick creepy teaser the other day:
“It’s deep. It’s dark, which is what we love as fans of the show,” star Paola Lázaro (Princess) told Insider. “We love when we go deep and dark so I think fans are going to be super excited about it.”
Season 11 will find our heroes dealing with the Commonwealth, the most advance post-apocalyptic civilization we’ve seen on the show yet. It can’t come soon enough.
New episodes of The Walking Dead season 10 drop Sundays on AMC. Meawhile, Kirkman’s latest TV project, the superhero series Invincible featuring Walking Dead alum Steven Yeun, premieres this Friday, March 26 on Amazon Prime Video.
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