Andrew Lincoln would headline a trilogy of “Walking Dead” movies centered on Rick Grimes. These were intended as big-budget features that would expand the scope of the franchise in a big, bad way. “The Walking Dead” chief content officer Scott M. Gimple had this to say about the ambitious project at the time of its announcement:
“The story of Rick will go on in films. Right now, we’re working on three but there’s flexibility in that … over the next several years, we’re going to be doing specials, new series are quite a possibility, high-quality digital content and then some content that defies description at the moment. We’re going to dig into the past and see old characters. We’re going to introduce new characters and new situations.”
Advertisement
Those movies never came to pass. Lincoln left “The Walking Dead” in season 9, setting up the story that the movies would have followed. So, what happened with the movies, exactly? Why did AMC cancel them? The answer is complicated in that circumstances beyond the network’s control came into play. It’s also, in the end, somewhat simple in that the nature of the business changed, rendering the idea infeasible.
