The last two episodes of The Walking Dead season 10 have introduced yet another memorable comic book character into the TV series – this time, Juanita Sanchez, as played by Paola Lazaro, better known as Princess. As per the comics, Princess was introduced as a surprisingly quirky loner who appears to be the only person left alive in her home city. Her neighborhood went unnamed on screen, but fans assumed it was supposed to be Pittsburgh, like the source material.
Showrunner Angela Kang has clarified that this not the case on the show, however, for a couple of very good reasons. One is that, given Eugene and co.’s new destination of Charleston, West Virginia, it doesn’t make geographical sense for them to travel through Pittsburgh. The other, much more fascinating reason, though, is that she was asked to change the location in order to accommodate plans for other corners of the franchise.
“No, it’s not supposed to be Pittsburgh. We took a different path,” Kang explained. “The comic book destinations, we were mapping and we’re like, ‘Pittsburgh does feel a little out of the way.’ And also, there was a request from [The Walking Dead chief content officer Scott Gimple] from the universe side to sort of avoid that area, and so we are on a different path.”
Kang doesn’t spell it out, but we can likely determine that Gimple requested the show avoided traveling to Pittsburgh due to his plans for those Andrew Lincoln-starring TWD movies. No story details have been confirmed about the films right now, but the animated teaser shown at Comic-Con last summer appeared to feature Rick Grimes’ helicopter flying towards the Philadelphia skyline. If that is where Rick ends up, then the Pennsylvania city is only a 305 mile drive away, so it doesn’t seem out of the question that it could factor into the world-building of the movies.
It looks like we can narrow down The Walking Dead films to taking place in the northeastern area of the country, then. Which should help fans who are busy theorizing what we may see in them.