The Walking Dead: World Beyond Showrunner Addresses Delayed Series Premiere

The Walking Dead: World Beyond co-creator and showrunner Matt Negrete commemorated what would have marked the premiere date of the two-season limited event series after it was delayed amid the coronavirus crisis. The new series co-created by chief content officer and former Walking Dead showrunner Scott Gimple was scheduled to premiere Sunday, April 12, following the Season 10 finale of The Walking Dead. The season finale was indefinitely postponed by AMC when it became clear post-production work on the special effects-heavy episode could not be completed before California shut down for business. Both the Season 10 finale and the premiere episode of World Beyond will now air at an undetermined date later in the year.

“Today was the original premiere date of @twdworldbeyond which had to be pushed to later this year due to current events,” Negrete wrote in an Instagram post published Sunday, accompanied by an image of chairs for its primary cast: Hope (Alexa Mansour), Iris (Aliyah Royale), Silas (Hal Cumpston) and Elton (Nicolas Cantu). “On the bright side, given how each day blends into the next, ‘later this year’ will be here before we know it.”

“Til then, let’s all do what we can to stay safe and healthy look out for each other,” Negrete added. “Better days are coming.”

Taking place a decade post-outbreak, putting the events of World Beyond in sync with Season 10 of The Walking Dead, the new series differs from the main show and first spinoff Fear the Walking Dead by focusing on a younger group of survivors who have spent the majority of the apocalypse inside a place of relative safety and comfort.

Introducing the Campus Colony in Nebraska, home to experienced apocalypse survivors Felix (Nico Tortorella) and Huck (Annet Mahendru), World Beyond deeply involves the Civic Republic Military, an organization responsible for the disappearance of Rick Grimes (Andrew Lincoln) from the mothership series.

“I mean there’s a lot of things that make it different. The first one is really the situation with which the characters have been living in, relatively, a first world situation. Relatively,” Gimple previously told EW. “Because it’s focusing on young people, even the ‘adults’ in this are on the younger side, they’ve more or less grown up with this. There’s a certain everydayness of this to them, though they’ve been behind walls.”

When a dangerous mission calls for Hope, Iris, Silas and Elton to journey into the world beyond, where they’ll encounter flesh-eating “empties,” it’s “a very big deal for these characters to leave these walls.”

“Even though they aren’t like, ‘Oh, what are these people?’ They aren’t shocked upon seeing walkers, but it’s just they haven’t been interacting with them. They haven’t had to interact with them,” Gimple noted. “It’s an incredible act of bravery for some of these people to potentially step out into the world.”

Also starring Joe Holt and Julia Ormond, The Walking Dead: World Beyond premieres later this year on AMC. For all things TWD, follow the author @CameronBonomolo on Twitter.