The Walking Dead: Third Series in Development

AMC's chief operating officer has confirmed that The Walking Dead franchise is actively developing a third show.

Soon the zombie TV trilogy will be complete. The Walking Dead franchise (not to be confused with merely The Walking Dead) is officially moving forward with developing a second spinoff of The Walking Dead and the third Walking Dead series overall.

AMC’s Chief Operating Officer Ed Carroll made the announcement during AMC’s fourth quarter 2018 earnings conference call with reporters and analysts. 

“That is in active development,” Carroll said, as transcribed by The Wrap. “We’re not yet at a stage where we’ll be announcing its plans to premiere. But we have hired creative people that have pitched story outlines. We feel very good about the development of that series.”

That’s the nice thing about publicly traded companies like AMC Networks (AMCX). They must speak to the public quarterly about things that could affect shareholders’ stock value. Among those things that would affect stock? A new The Walking Dead show, naturally.

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It’s not news that The Walking Dead is looking to expand once again. When AMC appointed Scott Gimple the czar of all Walking Dead-related content, they did so with the expectation that there would be more TV shows down the line. Still, this is the first explicit confirmation from AMC that a third TV series is in active development.

So far movement in the expanded Walking Dead universe has been slow. Previous to this, the only other official project on the docket is a series of Walking Dead films featuring Rick Grimes (Andrew Lincoln). Granted, that is a pretty huge project. But the franchise will have to continue to find ways to inject new blood to support the mother ship franchise The Walking Dead, as it approaches its 10th(!!!) season.

The Walking Dead‘s first spinoff, Fear the Walking Dead, is starting to resemble its parent program more and more each year. After the character of Morgan (Lennie James) crossed over last year, Dwight (Austin Amelio) is set to do the same thing in Fear the Walking Dead Season 5.

Alec Bojalad is TV Editor at Den of Geek and TCA member. Read more of his stuff here. Follow him at his creatively-named Twitter handle @alecbojalad