The Walking Dead season 9 has now entered production, executive producer Greg Nicotero confimed during a Facebook Live session.

He said (via ComicBook.com): “We just finished editing the [season 8] finale, which feels weird, because we shot in November and we’re still working on posting the show and doing the visual effects. And you guys are doing [additional dialogue recording] and every once in a while you get called to record some additional stuff, so we’re still finishing last season and then we just started season 9.”

“We just did the pitch out for season 9, and there’s some really cool stuff coming,” Robert Kirkman added to Screen Junkies. “They’re always coming up with cool new evolutions for the zombies and there’s some big stuff coming up in season 9 that I’m hinting at and I’ll probably get in trouble for, zombie-wise.”

Speculation that the show will end at some point soon has followed The Walking Dead for a while, and Kirkman teased the fact that the finale has been planned despite the series continuing for “many, many, many more years”.

“I do have an endpoint in mind for The Walking Dead, and I think that it’s my responsibility — and the responsibility of all the writers on the TV show — to the audience, because they’ve been on this journey for so long,” he said.

“The Walking Dead isn’t gonna last forever. It might go on for many, many, many more years, but I think that for anyone that’s been on that journey for that long, they deserve a satisfying end. They deserve to know that the time that they invested in this thing was all working towards something, and was building to some kind of reward, and so I think to not have any kind of end goal in mind and not have a plan would be terrible.”

“There is a plan, I do have an endpoint in mind,” he added. “It is far away off so don’t worry, but we’re building to that. So each and every piece of the story is designed to get us, hopefully, to a satisfying conclusion. But I am fully prepared for everyone to be disappointed.”