The Walking Dead: Greg Nicotero Updates Season 10 Finale Delay

The Walking Dead was on a roll with high quality episodes in a masterfully crafted tenth season before the post-production team was abruptly shutdown. The series was gearing up to air its penultimate episode of the season when the decision to shutdown the state of California came, which meant the post-production team could not safely gather to complete the VFX on the massive finale episode. The Walking Dead showrunner Angela Kang previously opened about the delay in an interview with ComicBook.com and now, VFX genius and executive producer Greg Nicotero has opened up on it, as well.

“When you’re in post-production, it kind of goes like this,” Nicotero told EW. “You have to edit the episode, then you do sound effects, and then you do music, and then visual effects, and then color timing to make sure all the colors in all the scenes match, and then you have to do a quality check to make sure nothing is messed up. So there are all these steps that have to happen, and generally speaking, the way our production schedule works is those happen up to about three weeks before the episode airs.”

The episode had been filmed in November of 2019. “We were really on our way to the finish line when things started slowing down because of the stay at home work order,” Nicotero says. “So we just missed that window. It wasn’t that the effects were delayed or anything was delayed. It was just the delivery of the episode was set to be delivered at a specific date and we had to shut down before they hit that date.”

Despite the delay, Nicotero assures there is plenty of reason to be excited for the episode which air later this year. “It’s a really amazing episode,” he said. “I love the way episode 15 ends where you see Beta bringing the herd to the tower where everybody is holed up. There’s a lot teed up, so to speak.”

Among those “teed up” stories is the return of Lauren Cohan as Maggie, a moment which fans have been eagerly awaiting since the actress and character left the series following Episode 9×05 in 2018.

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