The Walking Dead’s Rick Grimes Movies Are Going To Be Very Different, Show Wild New Directions

The vague teases about The Walking Dead‘s upcoming movies centered around Rick Grimes continue, this time with the franchise’s chief content officer Scott Gimple promising the script is coming along “amazingly” and that the movies will take the post-apocalyptic universe in “wild new directions.” It’s all really a bunch of adjectives which prove Gimple’s impressive ability to dive deeper into his thesaurus of a mind, saying things to keep fans interested in the films which were promised a couple of years ago but not give away any details of the still-in-flux story that may or may not be coming in the movie.

“We are going to continue to tell Rick’s story, and we are going to discover so much of the world through that story,” Gimple told EW. “Rick will be challenged in different ways that, in some ways, everything that he’s been through has sort of prepared him for. It’s a much larger world than one that he had been operating in, and that was challenging in and of itself. Now things are heightened, and just as we’re going to the movies — and it is the movies proper, suitably wide screen — we’re going to be filling that screen with a brand new world.”

Somehow, it feels like Gimple is both saying something new and exciting about the movies while also saying nothing at all.

“The scale is bigger and the budget is bigger, and it’s The Walking Dead, but heightened, both in the narrative themes, but also in just what we see onscreen,” Gimple said, pointing out that the movies will literally be that. They will be experienced in theaters through the box office and not at home on AMC, as AMC, Universal Studios, and Skybound are all involved.

“I say heightened, but I should also say it’s also very different,” Gimple notes. “It’s not going to be the exact same thing we saw on television, just larger. We are going in some wild new directions. Movies are a different beast than television. Television is like, boom, we’re done. Movies, to calibrate an hour and a half, two hours is no joke, and it’s been a lot of fun, but it’s a real challenge and we take it very seriously for the fans. We really want to deliver them something special, something worth their trip to the movies. We’re trying to be very deliberate and deliver something new.”

Gimple admits the project does not yet have a director and the writers currently “refining” the script, which he promises is “coming together amazingly.”

As for whether or not there will still be three movies as originally planned, Gimple says there will be but cautions: “We are still playing with things. That’s the plan right now.”