Andrew Lincoln Confirms The Walking Dead Movie Shooting Start

Andrew Lincoln confirms The Walking Dead movie shoots in the spring — if the English actor is allowed to return to America amid coronavirus travel restrictions. In July, producer David Alpert said the untitled movie paused production due to the COVID-19 pandemic and would "wait for it to be safe" to begin filming. As the entertainment industry moves forward with strict coronavirus protocols that allowed the Walking Dead television show to restart filming in October after months of COVID-19 delays, the Rick Grimes actor expects to return to the country in just a matter of weeks:

"With good intentions, and if everything works and I can leave my country, I plan to be back in America filming in spring-summer," Lincoln told Extra while virtually promoting his new Netflix movie Penguin Bloom.

In a December update, Lincoln said the rollout of COVID-19 vaccinations made it possible for the Walking Dead feature film to roll cameras in the spring — some two years after a planned production start in 2019.

"We are continuing to work on the movie. It is happening," writer-producer Scott Gimple previously told Insider. "We're taking this time from COVID and we're hunkering down and Mr. Lincoln, Mr. [Robert] Kirkman, Mr. Alpert, AMC, Universal — we're all charging forward it on it. It's just taking a bit more than TV. And then [we're] working on the new shows. So we have stuff into the future of The Walking Dead, and a lot of very different stuff. I'm really excited to hopefully have some more stuff to talk about with you coming into the New Year."

Acknowledging the two-year delay since he announced Lincoln's return in a film trilogy that will now open in theaters, Gimple added, "I know people are really itchy. These are no joke. We make an episode of TV in eight days. Movies are a different thing. It's going to be amazing. For all the pressure that we have on us for taking this long, that only makes it [so] that we have to make it amazing. So we will."

A spring-summer shoot would put the Walking Dead movie on track for a theatrical opening in 2022, the same year the television show finishes airing its 24-episode eleventh and final season on AMC.

The Walking Dead returns to AMC with new episodes on Sunday, February 28. Follow the author @CameronBonomolo on Twitter for all things TWD.