Cole Bryant: Hey hey — bro, before we do anything else, did you see the ScreenRant thing?
Zara Reyes: The Chandler Riggs interview? Yes. I have thoughts.
Cole Bryant: He pitched a Carl Grimes spinoff — a written pitch, straight to Scott Gimple — and it just sat there. It never got picked up, never got a greenlight, never got anything. And he's telling us this now. In October 2026. While he's promoting a Resident Evil fan film.
Zara Reyes: The fan film being the key detail everyone's glossing over.
Cole Bryant: Right — Biohazard, yeah. So like, what even is the move here? Is this — wait, no, what's your read, because I feel like you already have a take that's going to make me feel dumb.
Zara Reyes: The take is simple. Think of it like a musician revealing a shelved album on the day their new single drops. The shelved project doesn't compete with the new thing — it deepens it. It says 'I'm an artist with a body of work you don't even know about yet.' Chandler Riggs just did that move with Carl Grimes and a never-greenlighted AMC pitch.
Cole Bryant: Okay — that's clean. That's really clean. But I need to know if he volunteered that to Grant Hermanns or if Grant specifically asked, because those are two very different versions of this story.
Zara Reyes: Lowkey — does it matter? Either way, it landed in a press interview for a different project. That's the fact on the ground.
Cole Bryant: Yeah but — okay, the timing thing, I get it, but we're skipping over the actual pitch. Like what was *in* it. Because Riggs didn't just say 'Carl should've lived.' He had a specific thing he wanted to explore — the whole gap between seasons 7 and 8, what flipped Carl from kill-or-be-killed to suddenly advocating for peace. That's a real thematic question. That's not nothing.
Zara Reyes: No, that's actually — wait, that IS interesting. Because that pivot in Carl happens fast on screen.
Cole Bryant: So fast. And Riggs is basically saying there's a whole internal transformation that just got skipped. The show killed him off in season 8 in 2018 and we never saw the *mechanism* of that shift. That's the story he wanted to tell. Which, dude — that's a legitimate gap.
Zara Reyes: But Gimple got this pitch in writing. Directly. And then what? Nothing? No greenlight, no formal rejection, no 'thanks but no'?
Cole Bryant: That's the part that — no, wait, that's actually weirder than a rejection would be. A no is a door closing. This is a door that's just... ajar? With nobody on the other side? Like, it didn't die in a room. It died in an inbox. That's a completely different thing.
Zara Reyes: An inbox nobody answered. Which, for AMC — the same AMC running Dead City, running Daryl Dixon — that's a choice.
Cole Bryant: Right — but those are franchise anchors. Carl's thing would've been — I mean, even structurally, given how tight that season 7 to 8 window is, you're looking at something closer to The Ones Who Live. Six episodes, one season, done. That's prestige limited series territory, not 'keep subscribers for three years' territory.
Zara Reyes: And Scott Gimple never gave it even a hard no. That's the detail I can't get past. Not a yes. Not a no. Just — nothing.
Cole Bryant: And that nothing — that's damning, because the window wasn't forever. Like, Riggs is 27 now. Twenty-seven. Carl died in 2018. You do the math on when AMC would've needed to say yes to make a live-action prequel between seasons 7 and 8 even work — that's 2019, 2020 at the absolute latest. That's it. That was the whole window.
Zara Reyes: The window just... expired in an inbox.
Cole Bryant: No, wait — imagine you're a baker, right? You bake a cake for a birthday, you put it on the counter, everybody's like 'yeah we'll get to it,' nobody eats it, and then three days later someone goes 'hey should we cut this?' That's this pitch. The cake was real. The cake was probably good! It's just — it's a different thing now.
Zara Reyes: No but that's actually the partial win for the age argument. It's not that the pitch was bad — it's that nobody moved.
Cole Bryant: Exactly — and the thing that really stings is The Ones Who Live existed. Six episodes, one season, Rick and Michonne, done. That is the exact structure a Carl prequel needed. AMC literally proved they could do that format.
Zara Reyes: Six episodes! That's all it would've taken. And they greenlit The Ones Who Live, they greenlit Dead City, Daryl Dixon is on season four — but a compressed in-universe story about a dead kid's moral journey? Crickets.
Cole Bryant: Because those are all — dude, Rick's alive, Daryl's alive, Maggie's alive. The franchise only bets on characters who can carry a multi-season arc. And that's — I mean, that's the thing we haven't even touched yet, which honestly makes this whole pitch story worse once you look at AMC's actual pattern.
Zara Reyes: Wait, are you saying what I think you're saying — like, Carl being dead wasn't just a creative problem, it was a structural dealbreaker from AMC's side?
Cole Bryant: That's — yeah, and a comic book got floated as the only door left open at this point. Which, Robert Kirkman kept Carl alive for the entire run. The live-action window is gone. It's permanent now. But we should actually get into why Gimple greenlit what he greenlit, because that pattern is a whole other thing.
Zara Reyes: And that pattern is actually the whole verdict, right? Because Carl's death in season 8 wasn't just a creative call people were annoyed about — Robert Kirkman literally kept Carl alive in the comics through the entire run, made him Rick's successor. The show killed the character the source material said should've outlasted Rick.
Cole Bryant: That's — wait, that makes the scrapped pitch so much worse. Because Riggs wasn't pitching a vanity project. He was pitching the fix for an actual mistake.
Zara Reyes: A partial fix. You can't undo the death. But a prequel between seasons 7 and 8 gives Carl back his thematic weight — his moral arc lands, his transformation makes sense, the death feels earned instead of just... wrong.
Cole Bryant: Instead AMC greenlighted Dead City — Maggie, Negan, alive — Daryl Dixon, alive, now on season four, The Ones Who Live, Rick and Michonne, alive. Every single spinoff is built around a character who can keep showing up.
Zara Reyes: That's the structural dealbreaker, and I don't think it's even cynical — it's just AMC's actual business. They're not in the prestige eulogy business. They're in the 'keep people subscribed through season four' business.
Cole Bryant: No, totally — but that's also what makes the non-answer from Gimple so damning? Like, I mean — no rejection even implies they at least considered the window. The silence implies it never made it past an inbox.
Zara Reyes: So the verdict is actually two compounded losses. Carl shouldn't have died per Kirkman's blueprint — that's loss one. The one project that could've partially remedied it never got a real hearing — that's loss two.
Cole Bryant: And now Chandler Riggs is 27, the live-action window is permanently closed, and the only door anyone's floated is a comic book. Which — dude. That's the ending.
Zara Reyes: The pitch didn't fail because it was bad. It failed because AMC doesn't build franchises around dead people. Full stop.
Cole Bryant: My one detail I cannot shake — Gimple never even sent back a no. Not a no. Just. Nothing. That's it. That's my thing.
Zara Reyes: Mine is that Chandler Riggs dropped this while promoting Biohazard. A Resident Evil fan film. That's the press tour. That's the context. Scott Gimple's inbox is sitting there unread and Riggs is out here doing zombie content press anyway.
Cole Bryant: I mean — wait, that's kind of perfect though? Like, the pitch didn't go anywhere so he just... became the monster movie guy. Carl Grimes, moral arc, seasons 7 to 8, six-episode prestige series — nope. Biohazard fan film? Sure, let's go.
Zara Reyes: Honestly? To Chandler Riggs. The pitch was real. The timing was smart. And the silence from Gimple will live rent-free in that inbox forever.
