Before Rick Grimes (Andrew Lincoln) made his triumphant return to The Walking Dead universe in the new TV showThe Ones Who Live, the original idea was for him to make his comeback in a trilogy of Walking Dead movies. However, after years in development, these movies never made it to theaters, and the story was revised and developed into the six-episode TV show The Ones Who Live.
The first Rick Grimes movie was announced during Comic-Con in 2019. In fact, the original teaser trailer is still around online, a fragment of a project that never happened. It features plenty of CRM helicopters, something we see a lot of in The Ones Who Live. Take a look:
Speaking with TVLine, franchise boss Scott Gimple explained that the movies were ultimately “a very, very different thing that actually was going through a lot of iterations unto itself.”
For instance, Michonne (Danai Gurira) was still a pivotal character in The Walking Dead at the time the movies entered development, so she wasn’t even included in the script of the first film. “When we started [developing] the films, Danai [Gurira] was still on [The Walking Dead], so she was not in that first movie, and thus it was just enormously different.” Of course, in The Ones Who Live, Michonne became as important a character as Rick; the series was at its heart a love story.
That said, Michonne and Rick would’ve reunited by the second movie. “I knew [Danai] would be available by then, and I knew she was unbelievably critical,” Gimple said, adding that the core conflicts remained the same. “But that made for a very different movie, even though Rick’s circumstances were very much the same, and the relationship with CRM and the city was very much the same.”
We’ll never know whether The Walking Dead movies would’ve been a success. But The Ones Who Live managed to live up to the hype. The series got brilliant reviews from fans and Gimple is proud of what the team managed to put together. “It was a wild ride to make The Ones Who Live. It was like six years of a lot of hoping and pivoting and working,” he said. “It didn’t eventuate the way I thought it would; it eventuated so much better.”
Asked whether there will be a season 2 at any point, Gimple played it coy. “That’s possible,” he concluded.
All six episodes of The Ones Who Live are now streaming on AMC.
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