Note: It is a journal without spoiler of the four episodes of Marvel Zombies, which made its debut on Disney + on September 24, 2025.
Marvel is and so …? may have taken its course after three seasons, but the series now has a full spin-off in the form of Marvel zombies. Drawing on the episode of season 1 which introduced a version of the MCU invaded by a zombie plague, this animated series offers all blood, goop and gore viewers. But more importantly, this gives MCU fans something that was completely refused to them during the MCU multi saga.
Marvel Zombies takes up more or less where the original “What if … the zombies?!” Left before in 2021. It’s been five years since civilization collapsed under the weight of the hordes of endless living deadlines. Now, only a handful of heroes like Mrs. Marvel (Iman Vellani), Ironheart (Dominique Thorne), Hawkeye (Hailee Steinfeld), Shang-Chi (Simu Liu) and Yelena Belova (Florence Pugh) survive to carry the torch for humanity. Fortunately for them, new hope emerges that could well help these survivors recover their world. Although it is not if the queen of the dead, Wanda Maximoff by Elizabeth Olsen, has something to say about it.
The result is a fairly manual manual but entertaining the adventure of horror of survival. Marvel Zombies is nothing terribly revolutionary with the concept of zombies. If anything, he plays a little safer things than the ostensible source material, Robert Kirkman and the Marvel Zombies comics from Sean Phillips. These books are remarkable for making their zombies the protagonists, exploring the increasingly desperate fate of a zombified team of Avengers while they are looking for new food sources in a world where living humans are a hot goods. These zombies have kept their intelligence, reading a fairly new (and often surprisingly silly).
There is none of this here. The aforementioned queen of the dead is the only villain who still has a human intelligence, so the series tends to follow more closely the gaming book of zombie films. The first three episodes are all based on the same basic formula – our heroes flee to a familiar MCU location, only for the living dead to arrive and spoil their plans. It is only in the final that the series shakes this formula and tries something different. Although granted, it does it in a fairly epic and breathtaking way. In terms of scale, episode 4 is Avengers: worthy of an end of the game, marked by a truly epic battle sequence that draws the best party from this grotesque and zombi universe.
But more than the zombies themselves, Marvel Zombies has two main elements working in his favor. The first is that it allows us to enjoy a version of the MCU where toys can be and are frequently broken and thrown away. The armor of the plot is removed here, leaving a world where strange alliances are forged and even the A-List Avengers can meet a macabre end. The creators Bryan Andrews and Zeb Wells have clearly had a lot of pleasure in thinking about how the appearance of a zombie plague in the MCU would take place in the long term. Half an hour has never been enough time for “What if … zombies?!” To dig properly in the concept, it is therefore good to see that it gives itself much more space to breathe now.
The other element comes back to the idea that this series offers something that the largest multiverse saga has failed to do. It is not a secret for anyone that Marvel really had trouble rebuilding the dynamics of the MCU after the game. Just watch the slow box-office numbers for the 2025 film. If you can boil the problems of this cinematographic universe to any thing, it is that Marvel focused on the introduction of new characters and scenarios and not enough on weaving together. The fact that there is no Avengers style team film between the end of the game and Doomsday (and no, the Thunderbolts do not count) is as much a testimony of this defect as anything. At one point, Marvel must stop introducing new toys and playing with those he has.
This lost potential is finally carried out in the Marvel zombies. Admittedly, it is not the Core McU, but the characters and their personalities are cut off from the same fabric. If the cast mentioned above did not make it obvious, Marvel Zombies focuses strongly on the crew of the 4 and 5 phases on the classic favorites of the Avengers. This allows the series to dig these new characters and play them from each other in a very satisfactory way.
At first, the series has a lot of fun with the Kamala / Kate / Riri team, making part of the promise that suspended Young Avengers of Marvel tease. Meanwhile, characters like Shang-Chi, Katie (Awkwafina) and Jimmy Woo (Randall Park) become Max Mad style raiders in a post-apocalyptic desert. That doesn’t say anything about Blade (Todd Williams), a Marvel character just can’t seem to take off in the MCU. Here, the emblematic vampire hunter has been redesigned as “Blade Knight”, the new Khonshu’s avatar by Moon Knight (F. Murray Abraham), which turns out to be a terribly entertaining combination. It’s just a shame that Mahershala Ali is one of the few players in live action not to resume their role here, which makes it more and more likely that his vocal cameo in Eternals is all that we will ever get his blade.
Even as the plot progresses and the number of bodies begins to accumulate, the series is excellent to establish the relationships between these characters. The growing link is particularly effective between Kamala and Red Guardian (David Harbor), the latter developing a paternal affection for his youngest ally. All this helps the great emotional rhythms and the dead of characters were much more difficult. Again – why don’t we see more of this kind of thing in the ordinary MCU? Why does he come across a zombie show to do what the multiverse saga films will not be?
All this culminates in a particularly satisfactory final episode. As mentioned, the scope of the final is really something else. If the show is to know if …? – The inspired animation style does not always do justice to the characters during the quieter moments (faces lacking details and the zombies often seem that their injuries are painted), it really shines and develops an explosive animated quality when the action begins to flow. The finish also excels in the tension of construction, increasing the issues until the fate of an entire universe is at stake. This goes to an end which, although it can prove to be division, feels faithful to the dark and desperate nature of this universe. For all that the first three episodes are formulates in terms of intrigue, it is worth staying at the end of this ride.
