Danai Gurira says that The Walking Dead could finally get a musical made for the franchise. She even said that there are active conversations about the possibility, though she doesn't know if it's very likely.
In the newest issue of SFX magazine, Danai said that the Walking Dead team has been "actually chatting" about a possible musical. She clarified that she wasn't exactly being serious when she said before that The Walking Dead could be turned into a Broadway musical, but that it nevertheless has led to some conversations with franchise boss Scott M. Gimple about the best way to potentially make a musical happen. From her view, Gurira suggests the biggest challenge may be in finding a strong enough story that would have to be contained to the length of a single play.
"I was just joking around about having a Walking Dead musical on Broadway. Me and [Scott] Gimple are actually chatting about it, which is ridiculous," she explained. "He's just said we don't have the rights to it. I'm like, 'Well, let's talk to [Robert] Kirkman, see what he says to that.' I mean, we're really largely just joking around. But stranger things have been done, and I do love the theatre… It's about, how do you confine it to something? Because it's just so much story. So it would really be, how do you confine it to a good two-or-three-hour play?"
Multiple Spinoffs Are Keeping The Walking Dead Alive
While there are no concrete plans at this time for a musical, the world of The Walking Dead has continued following the eleventh and final season of the original series. Gurira returned to reprise her role as Michonne in the recent spinoff series, The Walking Dead: The Ones Who Live, reuniting with Rick Grimes actor Andrew Lincoln. Both had departed The Walking Dead as series regulars before the end of the show.
Every once in a while, Glenn Rhee's gruesome death in The Walking Dead Season 7 premiere comes back to haunt everyone. His death was a turn-off for many fans of the series. Many claim it was too violent to put on cable television. But at that point in the series, cannibals were slashing people's throats and walkers were ripping survivors apart. There was far worse gore in previous seasons, which had already cut out much more disturbing scenes from the comics. The true problem with Glenn's death was that it was teased by a cliffhanger that people had to wait months for. Gore and guts is par for the course of The Walking Dead. You can't blame it for going all out with the most iconic death from the comics.
There are other spinoffs that will also keep The Walking Dead alive, at least for now. Jeffrey Dean Morgan and Lauren Cohan will return as Negan and Maggie in the upcoming second season of The Walking Dead: Dead City. Norman Reedus will also be joined by Melissa McBride for The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon - The Book of Carol. Reedus has also teased that he can see himself playing Daryl for another "six or seven years," so that series could potentially go on for several more years to come.
