The Walking Dead Fans Will Have to Wait Longer for Rick and Michonne’s Return

This article contains spoilers for The Walking Dead.

After first announcing at 2022’s San Diego Comic-Con that Rick (Andrew Lincoln) and Michonne’s (Danai Gurira) story would be continuing as a six-episode limited series rather than a movie trilogy, AMC has now revealed that this spinoff of The Walking Dead likely won’t be coming anytime soon. When the series was first announced, it was originally given a release window of 2023, but that window has now been pushed to 2024.

According to TV Line, the president of entertainment and AMC Studios at AMC Network Dan McDermott said during the Television Critics Association press tour that production on “the next chapter in Rick and Michonne’s unforgettable love story” was set to begin this year and that he and AMC “look forward to sharing [the series] next year.” The series finale of The Walking Dead “Rest in Peace” already did a great job of setting up Rick and Michonne’s journey back to each other, but now it looks like fans will have to wait even longer to see how their story ends.

When asked about the series at SDCC, chief content officer for The Walking Dead Scott M. Gimple said “Rick and Michonne are two of my favorite people, and Danai and Andy are two of my favorite people. Working with all of them continues to be a dream come true. The three of us, along with a terrific team of [Walking Dead] all-stars and incredible new voices are crafting an insane love epic worth the long, long wait.”

While we don’t know a lot about how Rick and Michonne’s story will play out, AMC’s official synopsis says “This series presents an epic love story of two characters changed by a changed world. Kept apart by distance. By an unstoppable power. By the ghosts of who they were. Rick and Michonne are thrown into another world, built on a war against the dead… And ultimately, a war against the living. Can they find each other and who they were in a place and situation unlike any they’ve ever known before? Are they enemies? Lovers? Victims? Victors? Without each other, are they even alive — or will they find that they, too, are the Walking Dead?”

When we last saw the pair in The Walking Dead series finale, they were writing letters to their family and doing their best to navigate the post-apocalyptic wasteland. Michonne rides off into an enormous horde of walkers while Rick is trying to escape from the Civic Republic Military, showing just a hint of the lengths they will go to find each other again. 

After discovering that Rick didn’t actually die in the bridge explosion from season 9, Michonne left in season 10 of the original series to go off and look for him in an effort to bring their family back together. Considering that fans have already been waiting since then to see if Rick and Michonne would ever reunite and finally get the happy ending they deserve (or at least the happiest ending one can have during the zombie apocalypse), hopefully their spin-off won’t take too long to bring them back together again.