'The Walking Dead' Was Already Planning Season 10, Including Maggie Return

AMC renewing The Walking Dead for Season 10 is no surprise as the creative team behind the zombie series was anticipating future episodes.

Season Nine will return for its back half on Sunday night but The Walking Dead is already looking forward to 16 more episodes beginning in October of 2019. While none of the episodes in Season Nine can be drastically changed to accommodate a narrative which would plant seeds for the future episodes because production wrapped months ago, showrunner Angela Kang already had Season 10 in mind while at work.

"I'm already working on Season 10 stuff," Kang told ComicBook.com in November of 2018. "Yeah, trying to get a little bit of a jump on it, so after I do this round of press calls today I'm actually gonna jump back in with a couple of my senior writers and we're gonna talk about some stuff, just because it's like we want to get a head start on things. But it's sort of like the process doesn't end on our side of it, because it takes about a year and a half to make a season of the show, but we always air about the same time every year, so there's always about like a half a year overlap."

While Season Nine has proved to be pivotal for the series with both Andrew Lincoln and Lauren Cohan leaving their popular roles as Rick and Maggie, respectively, Kang is hoping to get one of the stars back in Season 10.

"We will hopefully come back to Maggie's story in Season 10," Kang said. "Lauren and I have been texting about some things, and we're hopefully gonna schedule a conversation, but Georgie's group is definitely out there in the world doing some stuff, and I have some notion of what they're up to. They may also be part of the universe in general. That's really up to Scott [Gimple], but we'll see how it all plays out. In our minds, there's a lot of things going on in the world around our characters and the way that it intersects with our story, that's part of what we're talking about currently."

As for Lincoln's Rick, a trilogy of films will resolve his story but a release date for those movies has not yet been revealed.

The Walking Dead TV series returns for the back half of its ninth season on February 10, 2019 at 9 pm ET. Fear the Walking Dead will return for its fifth season in 2019. For complete coverage and insider info all year long, follow @BrandonDavisBD on Twitter and watch ComicBook.com's After The Dead each Sunday night following new episodes.