The Walking Dead is clearly AMC’s biggest property and in its sixth season, the show is currently still going strong. In fact, the cabler even launched a spinoff to its hit series Fear The Walking Dead, which has also done pretty good ratings for the network, especially compared to the channel's other programming. Thus the question remains: Could a third Walking Dead series happen at AMC? Here’s what AMC network chief Charlie Collier had to say in a recent interview regarding the prospect of a third show in Robert Kirkman’s zombie universe.
The answer is we are open to ideas that feel organic to the creators in whom we’ve put our trust. So if Robert had a world he wanted to explore, you can bet that we are not just leaning into that conversation, but we’re actively engaging in it.
Now, you might be thinking that a third series may be overkill. After all, we already get 16 episode of The Walking Dead every year, and AMC already splits those 16 episode between a set of fall episodes and a set of winter episodes. Plus, because Fear the Walking Dead is definitely getting a second season on AMC, the cable channel has a summer zombie series, as well. Fans can spend nearly the entire year, with the exception of late spring and early summer with characters placed somewhere in the world that Robert Kirkman originated. Still, the possibilities for a third series are seemingly endless, as programming boss Joel Stillerman also told Vulture in the same interview that the whole point of Kirkman’s world is that it is open-ended and that the possibilities are endless.
If you ask Robert what his motivations were for writing The Walking Dead, he would say, ‘I loved zombie movies, but I just felt like the worst part of them was always the ending. You always had to manufacture some ending.’ So he set out to write this totally open-ended story, and the proof of that is in how vibrant the comics are.
This means, theoretically, that we could visit any timeline in the zombie universe and any continent and country. We’ve seen how the army reacted in Fear the Walking Dead and we’ve seen how grizzled characters like Rick are handling the aftermath quite some time later. One place I think many people would be happy to revisit would be the CDC or potentially head overseas to see how other countries fared during the outbreak, should AMC have the budget for it. What I’m saying is, there’s a lot of places a third series could go.
Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on your perspective regarding spinoffs), a third series is not currently in the works, according to Collier.
Right now we’re not in that conversation, and there’s nothing to report at all. I’m a huge believer in Robert and the executive producers of these shows. We wanted to create a place where they would bring us their creative dreams and bring us their passion projects. If Robert had another one, we would absolutely engage. This is a world that is rich enough to handle it. Right now we’re just focused on these two.
Right now, AMC is focused on pushing some different types of properties, including Into the Badlands and the upcoming comic book property Preacher. But somewhere down the line, who knows? Clearly the channel isn’t brushing off a second spinoff to the original. Hey, if Dick Wolf’s Chicago franchise could do it, I have no doubt AMC could do it, too.
