The Walking Dead’s Future Gets a Very Promising Update That Teases 15 More Years & Different Worlds

The Walking Dead isn’t slowing down anytime soon and may even extend until 2040 and beyond. The AMC mega-hit about a group of survivors battling to stay alive in a zombie apocalypse splashed onto the scene in October 2010 and quickly became a pop culture phenomenon, running for a total of 11 seasons before ending in 2022 and spawning numerous spinoffs. As the show approaches its 15th anniversary on October 31st, writer and executive producer Scott Gimple offered a promising update for the future of the franchise.

“It’s quite possible we could see this group up here 15 years from now,” Gimple said during a recent anniversary panel at Mipcom in Cannes, according to Variety, speaking alongside the cast of The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon.

According to Gimple, The Walking Dead Universe could continue well into the future through spinoffs in a similar vein to the Daryl Dixon series, which saw the fan-favorite character portrayed by Norman Reedus head to France. He teased that “there are many more continents to visit. It’s about how [the characters] evolve over time. It’s really exciting to see how far we can take this. In a lot of ways, [the locations] give the story to us.”

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Gimple didn’t divulge any concrete plans for future TWD iterations, but he did compare the potential to that of Marvel and DC, two franchises that have excelled at storytelling and crafting shared, evolving universes of canon stories and characters.

“It was all one story. It went in all sorts of different directions,” Gimple said. “Even with characters who have done so many things, we can put them in different worlds where they have different challenges and evolve them through these challenges.”

The Walking Dead has already proven its longevity beyond the flagship show through several wildly successful spinoff series. First there was Fear The Walking Dead, a series that aimed to chart the beginning days of the zombie apocalypse and was the first to bring the franchise out of the U.S. when it ventured to Mexico. It went on to grow with The Walking Dead: World Beyond, a series set in Nebraska a decade after the start of the zombie outbreak; the episodic anthology Tales of the Walking Dead, focused on new and existing characters in the TWD universe; the Rick and Michonne-centered limited series The Walking Dead: The Ones Who Live; and the currently running Maggie and Negan-centric The Walking Dead: Dead City and Daryl-centered The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon, the first to take the franchise overseas.

It will be interesting to see where The Walking Dead goes next. There is an endless number of existing characters within the franchise that could easily lead their own spinoffs, such as Judith Grimes, a character who represents the first generation of people born into the zombie apocalypse. There’s also an endless number of locations that could take the franchise in new directions, from the dense urban environments of Japan to the United Kingdom, a place established in Daryl Dixon Season 2 to be one of the only locations that appears to have survived the apocalypse.

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