Why The Walking Dead Movies Are Taking So Long

The Walking Dead movies featuring Rick Grimes were announced in November 2018, but there's been little news since. What's going on?

In November 18, shortly after Rick Grimes' departure from The Walking Dead, franchise lead Scott M. Gimple announced that there were three Walking Dead movies in development that would continue Rick's story. Andrew Lincoln was set to return, with Pollyanna Macintosh reprising her role as the mysterious Jadis, and the films would resolve a lingering mystery from the show. Heading into summer 2020, however, news about the Walking Dead movies appears to have dried up.

A short, animated teaser trailer for the first of the Rick Grimes movies was released in July 2019, announcing that it would release in theaters rather than on TV or streaming. AMC Networks president Josh Sapan said at the time that there had been interested from multiple studios, but ultimately Universal Pictures acquired the distribution rights. Early in the development stages there were plans to potentially begin shooting the first movie in 2019, but almost a year after the teaser, there's still no confirmed release date, nor is there a director attached.

The main reason The Walking Dead movies are taking so long seems to be the challenges of translating the format and characters of a long-running TV show into a feature film. For starters, in order for the film to be a box office success it can't really rely on audiences having seen all 10 seasons of The Walking Dead, so the script needs to be accessible to total newcomers. Offering an update in January 2020, Gimple said that the script was still being refined and that it was "an incredibly deliberate process." He also said that "story and product aspects" were in play, which suggests that there are challenges involved in making it fit with other corners of The Walking Dead's universe:

"There have been a lot of different aspects to it in terms of timing that are pretty much coming into rapid focus right now. I would say the past year in a lot of ways has been R&D on a lot of aspects of it."

Shortly after Rick was believed to have died by other characters in The Walking Dead (though actually he was whisked away by a mysterious helicopter), the show jumped forward in time by six years. Rick's partner, Michonne (Danai Gurira), recently left The Walking Dead after she discovered evidence that Rick had survived, and went on a search for her long-lost love. It's possible that the writing process for the Walking Dead movies was complicated by Gurira's decision to leave, since her exit from the show creates an opportunity for her to join the movies. Regardless of the exact reasons, it definitely seems as though the writing process has been the hang-up for the Walking Dead movies, and nothing much else can happen until the script is figured out.

Another reason for The Walking Dead movies' delay is the same problem afflicting a great many productions at the moment: more or less the entire film and TV industry is shut down as a result of the coronavirus pandemic. Development can continue in the form of writing and storyboarding, but filming is unlikely to resume before fall 2020 at the earliest. This could actually be to the movies' advantage, since the lockdown offers plenty of time to fine-tune the script for the first Rick Grimes movie. Hopefully by the time shooting is able to start again, things will move a lot more quickly.