The Walking Dead: Dead City, starring Lauren Cohan and Jeffrey Dean Morgan recently moved from April to June, and some exciting new details about the spin-off have now been revealed by the creative team.
The show is set to follow Maggie (Cohan) and Negan (Morgan) travelling into a post-apocalyptic Manhattan long ago cut off from the mainland. The crumbling city is filled with the dead and denizens who have made New York City their own world full of anarchy, danger, beauty, and terror.
As unsure as many fans have been about plans to expand the franchise after The Walking Dead wrapped up with season 11, this is an intriguing premise, and one that's made all the more exciting by the fact the story takes place in New York. Several years have passed since the zombie outbreak began, so we're definitely curious to see what's become of all those iconic landmarks!
During a recent interview with Collider (via FearHQ.com), showrunner Eli Jorne teased what fans can expect from the undead action heading to the Big Apple.
"The universe has never really lived in a city, the way it will, and in a city like New York, especially. Just environmentally and architecturally, there are so many new ways that we can experience walkers that you couldn’t have. There’s the verticality of the city, and that alone has been the gift that keeps on giving with walkers. How do you survive in that city, with that many walkers, as we’ll come to see, and the way that they are?"
"You’ll see interesting new walker experiences, but also those ripple effects of, how do you survive in a city with walkers? In The Walking Dead, they fought a lot of walkers in the woods, but there were a lot of stretches of woods where you could just hike and camp out. You don’t get to do that as much in the city."
The Walking Dead boss Scott Gimple also weighed in to tease "one of the most awesome, disgusting, terrifying walkers that I’ve seen in the history of the show."
"There are a number of horrific walkers, but there is a mind-bendingly horrific walker coming up that I wasn’t on set for, and I’m glad I wasn’t. I got to experience the horrific magic at home, and it is magic," he continues. "It quite possibly will make you throw up. I would just have something handy nearby, as you watch it."
Sounds pretty gnarly, right? Hopefully, the show's budget is big enough that we get to see Maggie and Negan splattering zombie brains across the likes of Times Square and the Empire State Building, though there's a chance the action will be restricted to a much smaller area. We'll see.
In addition to the two leads, the series stars Gaius Charles, Zeljko Ivanek, Karina Ortiz, Jonathan Higginbotham, and Mahina Napoleon.
As noted, The Walking Dead: Dead City premieres on AMC sometime this June.