Fans of The Walking Dead were in for a treat on Sunday when AMC dropped a sneak peek trailer for the highly anticipated spinoff featuring the return of Andrew Lincoln and Danai Gurira.
The Walking Dead: The Ones Who Live — which will premiere Feb. 25, 2024, on both AMC and AMC+ — will follow the epic love story between married pair Rick Grimes (Lincoln) and Michonne (Gurira), who first met on The Walking Dead. Both exited the series before it wrapped after 11 seasons in November 2022.
“People are going, ‘Where have you gone?’ “ Lincoln 50, says in the teaser. “Our ambition is to have some answers.”
“It’s a really exciting story to tell,” adds Gurira, 45. “These two people are so powerful and together it’s insane. This is some crazy love.”
The clip reveals the lengths the two characters will go to in their desire to reunite. Rick had been presumed dead when he left The Walking Dead in season 9 after blowing up a bridge to prevent an invasion of walkers, but Michonne later learned her spouse had survived and set out to find him in season 10.
Both later appeared in a post-credit scene of sorts in the show’s season finale, setting up the quest that will play out in their limited series spinoff.
“ The Walking Dead: The Ones Who Live presents an epic love story of two characters changed by a changed world,” the show’s description reads. “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?”
In addition to staring in the show, Lincoln and Gurira will also executive produce alongside showrunner Scott M. Gimple, Denise Huth and Brian Bockrath. The spinoff will replace the Rick Grimes movies that were first announced when Lincoln left TWD in 2018.
This will be the sixth spinoff to come from the The Walking Dead, itself an adaptation of the comic book series of the same name by Robert Kirkman, Tony Moore, and Charlie Adlard.
Fear the Walking Dead, the first installment into the franchise, wrapped its eight-season run on Sunday. Others have included The Walking Dead: World Beyond (2020–21), Tales of the Walking Dead (2022) as well as The Walking Dead: Dead City and The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon, which both premiered this year. They follow fan favorite characters Maggie ( Lauren Cohan), Negan ( Jeffrey Dean Morgan) and Daryl ( Norman Reedus) respectively.
At San Diego Comic-Con 2022, Lincoln and Gurira surprised the crowd to reveal that The Walking Dead: The Ones Who Live was on the way.
“We … have been cooking something up for you all because we missed you and we owe you the conclusion of this story of Rick and Michonne,” Gurira said at the time.
“I personally can’t wait to get my cowboy boots back on and get the band back together,” Lincoln added.