The Walking Dead

After steadily building buzz upon its 2003 debut, the notion of transitioning The Walking Dead to the screen swiftly gained traction, especially with the recent release of 2004's Dawn of the Dead remake, and Shaun of the Dead. George Romero's return to zombie territory with Land of the Dead (2005) also proved the vitality of the genre. When pondering the possibility of his property becoming a movie or TV show, Kirkman said in a 2010 interview, "I wasn't dying for it to happen. It was just, if it happened, that's great."Finally, in late 2009, a live action television series based on The Walking Dead was announced as being in development by filmmaker Frank Darabont (no stranger to adaptations himself, having previously brought three Stephen King novels to the screen, including 1993's The Shawshank Redemption) and producer Gale Anne Hurd (whose collaborations with famed director James Cameron on The Terminator and Aliens remain some of the most beloved and masterful mergers of sci-fi and horror of all time).A longtime admirer of the genre, Darabont professed to interviewer Alan Sepinwall that he'd always had the "love of zombies" gene. An avowed fan of the comic series, he had been circling the property since as early as 2005. After several fruitless years of trying to sell various studios and production companies on the idea of a serialized, open-ended zombie epic—a fairly revolutionary idea at the time, Darabont joined forces with Hurd, who saw the same promise in the premise that he did...Buy a copy to keep reading!