Note: This is a spoiler-free review of all four episodes of Marvel Zombies, which debuted on Disney+ on September 24, 2025.
Marvel’s What If…? may have run its course after three seasons, but the series does now have a full-fledged spinoff in the form of Marvel Zombies. Building on the Season 1 episode that introduced a version of the MCU overrun by a zombie plague, this animated series delivers all the blood, goop, and gore viewers would expect from the premise. But more importantly, it gives MCU fans something they’ve been utterly denied during the MCU’s Multiverse Saga.
Marvel Zombies picks up more or less where the original “What If… Zombies?!” left off in 2021. It’s been five years since civilization collapsed under the weight of the endless undead hordes. Now, only a smattering of heroes like Ms. 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, a new hope emerges that might just help these survivors reclaim their world. Though not if the Queen of the Dead, Elizabeth Olsen’s Wanda Maximoff, has anything to say about it.
The result is a fairly textbook but entertaining survival horror adventure. Marvel Zombies doesn’t do anything terribly groundbreaking with the zombie concept. If anything, it plays things a little safer than the ostensible source material, Robert Kirkman and Sean Phillips’ Marvel Zombies comics. Those books are notable for making their zombies the protagonists, exploring the increasingly desperate plight of a zombified team of Avengers as they seek out new food sources in a world where live humans are a hot commodity. Those zombies retained their intelligence, making for a fairly novel (and often surprisingly silly) read.
There’s none of that here. The aforementioned Queen of the Dead is the only villain who still possesses a human intelligence, so the series tends to more closely follow the zombie movie playbook. The first three episodes all rely on the same basic formula – our heroes flee to a familiar MCU location, only for the undead to arrive and spoil their plans. Only in the finale does the series shake up that formula and try something different. Though granted, it does so in a pretty epic and show-stopping way. In terms of scale, Episode 4 is Avengers: Endgame-worthy, marked by a truly epic battle sequence that makes the most of this grotesque, zombi-fied universe.
But more than the zombies themselves, Marvel Zombies has two main elements working in its favor. One is that it allows us to enjoy a version of the MCU where the toys can be and frequently are broken and tossed asunder. The plot armor is stripped away here, leaving a world where strange alliances are forged and even A-list Avengers can meet a grisly end. Creators Bryan Andrews and Zeb Wells clearly had a lot of fun thinking through how the onset of a zombie plague in the MCU would play out over the long term. Half an hour was never enough time for “What If… Zombies?!” to properly dig into the concept, so it’s good to see it being given far more room to breathe now.
The other element gets back to the idea that this series offers something the larger Multiverse Saga has utterly failed to do. It’s no secret that Marvel has really struggled to rebuild the MCU’s momentum post-Endgame. Just look at the sluggish box office numbers for 2025’s film slate. If you can boil this cinematic universe’s problems down to any one thing, it’s that Marvel has focused too much on introducing new characters and storylines and not nearly enough on weaving them together into a larger whole. The fact that there isn’t an Avengers-style team-up movie in between Endgame and Doomsday (and no, Thunderbolts doesn’t count) is as much a testament to this flaw as anything. At some point, Marvel has to stop introducing new toys and actually play with the ones it has.
That lost potential is finally realized in Marvel Zombies. Granted, this isn’t the core MCU, but the characters and their personalities are cut from the same cloth. If the cast mentioned above didn’t make it obvious, Marvel Zombies focuses heavily on the Phase 4 and 5 crew over the classic Avengers favorites. That allows the series to dig into these newer characters and play them off of one another in a very satisfying way.
Early on, the series has a lot of fun with the Kamala/Kate/Riri team-up, realizing some of the promise left dangling from The Marvel’s Young Avengers tease. Meanwhile, characters like Shang-Chi, Katie (Awkwafina), and Jimmy Woo (Randall Park) become Mad Max-style raiders in a post-apocalyptic wasteland. That’s to say nothing of Blade (Todd Williams), a character Marvel just can’t seem to get off the ground in the MCU. Here, the iconic vampire hunter has been reimagined as “Blade Knight,” the new avatar of Moon Knight’s Khonshu (F. Murray Abraham), which proves to be a terrifically entertaining combination. It’s just a shame that Mahershala Ali is one of the few live-action actors not to reprise their role here, making it seem more and more likely that his vocal cameo in Eternals is all we’ll ever get from his Blade.
Even as the plot progresses and the body count starts to pile up, the series is great at building up the relationships between these characters. Particularly effective is the growing bond between Kamala and Red Guardian (David Harbour), with the latter developing a fatherly affection for his younger ally. All of this helps the big emotional beats and character deaths hit that much harder. Again – why don’t we see more of this kind of thing in the regular MCU? Why does it fall on a zombie show to do what the Multiverse Saga movies won’t?
All of this culminates in a particularly satisfying final episode. As mentioned, the scope of the finale is really something else. If the show’s What If…?-inspired animation style doesn’t always do justice to the characters during the quieter moments (the faces lack detail and the zombies often look as though their wounds are painted on), it really shines and develops a bombastic anime quality when the action starts to flow. The finale also excels at building tension, raising the stakes until an entire universe’s fate hangs in the balance. That transitions into an ending that, while it may prove divisive, feels true to the bleak, hopeless nature of this universe. For all that the first three episodes are formulaic in terms of plot, it’s worth sticking around to the end of this ride.
