Executive producer Tom Luse recently hinted that the upcoming fifth season of "The Walking Dead" might be deviating from its "micro" perspective on zombie apocalypse as Rick (Andrew Lincoln) and his gang head to Washington D.C. to find a cure to the outbreak, Wetpaint reported.
Asked about the most challenging thing about Season 5 in particular in a recent interview with AMCTV, Luse answered, "I think our journey this season, especially at the beginning, is going to show the scale of the world that we're living in in a way that we haven't done before. That is the most interesting thing. We're showing many aspects of what has been going on for the last couple of years that we haven't had an opportunity to show before."
In the past four seasons, the show is solely based in Georgia. But now that Eugene (Josh McDermitt) claims he knows something about the cure, our heroes will make their way to Washington D.C. and for the first time will probably see how other urban areas have changed in the past two years since the start of the apocalypse, Wetpaint reported.
Viewers may also get another look at how the epidemic started (like the Season 2 flashback where Shane [Jon Bernthal] and Lori [Sarah Wayne Callies] watched Atlanta being bombed) in Season 5, Episode 1, which is said to give away a lot of back story about Terminus, Wetpaint speculated.
And now that Rick's group is out in the world in the upcoming season, makeup whiz and fellow executive producer Greg Nicotero said that there would be more walkers in every episode.
Greg Nicotero told Huffington Post Canada that they already finished filming the mid-season finale, and in that episode alone, his makeup team processed more than 800 walkers.
"I haven't done the tally yet for this season, but being out in the world it's a little trickier to avoid zombies," he said of the number of walkers they are about to process for the entire Season 5. "When you're in the prison, you have a safe haven. The zombies aren't so much of an everyday occurrence, whereas in this season we're out in the world at some point so they're there."
"The Walking Dead" Season 5 premieres Sunday, October 12 at 9 p.m. ET on AMC.