notes: Here is a spoiler-free review of all four episodes of Marvel Zombies, which debuted on Disney+ on September 24, 2025.
Marvel's words, if…? The course may have been launched three seasons later, but the series now has a comprehensive spin-off in the form of Marvel Zombies. The animated series introduces the version of MCU Overrum in the Season 1 episode, which offers all the expectations of blood, goop and Gore audiences. But more importantly, it provides MCU fans that they completely reject.
Marvel Zombies more or less pick up the original “If… Zombies?!” and leave in 2021. It has been five years since the endless undead tribe’s weight collapsed. Now only Ms. Marvel (Iman Vellani), Ironheart (Dominique Thorne), Hawkeye (Hailee Steinfeld), Shanghai-Chi (Simu Liu) and Yelena Belova (Florence Pugh) survived to carry the human Wolch (Torch). Fortunately for them, new hope emerges, which may only help these survivors take back their world. Although not the queen of the dead, Elizabeth Olson's Wanda Maximoff has something to say.
Marvel Zombie Picture Library
The result is a fair textbook, but entertaining survival horror adventure. Marvel Zombies did nothing fascinating about the zombie concept. If anything, it's safer than the ostensible source material, Robert Kirkman and Sean Phillips' Marvel Zombies comics. These books explore the dilemma of zombies becoming the protagonist and exploring the increasingly desperate plight of an Avengers’ stalemate team, who searches for new sources of food in a world where a hot commodity is a world of hot products. Those zombies retain their wisdom, making a rather novel (usually surprisingly stupid) read.
None here. The Queen of the Dead is the only villain who still has human intelligence, so the series tends to follow the zombie movie script more closely. The first three episodes all rely on the same basic formula – our heroes escape to the familiar MCU position just to get the undead to arrive and destroy their plans. Only in the finale does the series change that formula and try something different. Despite being awarded, it did it in a very epic way of performing. In terms of scale, Episode 4 is Avengers: The Most Worth Trying, marked by a truly epic battle sequence that makes the most of this weird zombie champion universe.
But what is more important than the zombies themselves is that there are two main elements that are beneficial to it. One of them is that it allows us to enjoy the MCU version where toys can and are often broken and tossed. The plot armor is stripped here, leaving behind a world of weird leagues where even the A-level Avengers can have a bad ending. Creators Bryan Andrews and Zeb Wells obviously started to play a lot of interesting thinking about how it started with a prolonged zombie plague. Half an hour never has enough time to do “if… zombies?!” to dig out the concept correctly, so it's nice to see it gives more room to breathe now.
Another element returns to what this series offers, the larger multiverse legend completely fails to do. It's no secret that Marvel has really struggled to rebuild the momentum of MCUs. Just check out the box office sluggishness of the 2025 movie Slate. If you can boil down the issue of this cinematic universe to anything, it is that Marvel is too focused on introducing new characters and storylines and weaving them into a larger whole. There is as much fact as anything about the fact that there is no Avengers team movie between Endgame and the Doomsday (no, Thunder doesn't count). At some point, Marvel had to stop introducing new toys and actually play with its toys.
Marvel Zombies finally realize this lost potential. Of course, this is not the core of the MCU, but the character and its personality are cut from the same piece of cloth. If the cast mentioned above makes it obvious, Marvel Zombies will focus on the crew of Phase 4 and Phase 5 instead of the classic Avengers favorites. This allows the series to mine these new characters and play with each other in a very satisfying way.
Early on, the series was happy to work with the Kamala/Kate/Riri team, realizing that some promises were wasted in Marvel’s young Avengers teasing. Meanwhile, characters like Shanghai-Chi, Katie (Awkwafina) and Jimmy Woo (Randall Park) become crazy Max-Style Raiders in the post-apocalyptic wasteland. There is nothing to say about Blade (Todd Williams), a character miracle that doesn't seem to stand out in the MCU. Here, the iconic vampire hunter is reimagined as the “Blade Knight”, the new incarnation of the Moon Knight, Khonshu (F. Murray Abraham), which proves to be a very interesting combination. It's a shame that Mahershala Ali is one of the few live actors, making his vocal cameo in Eternals increasingly likely to get from his blade.
Even if the plot progresses and the body count begins to pile up, the series is good at building relationships between these characters. The bond between Kamala and the Red Guardian (David Harbour) is especially effective, who develops a fatherly affection for his young allies. All of this helps the huge emotional beat and character death strikes. Again – Why don't we see more of this kind of thing in regular MCUs? Why does it fall on zombie shows, doing things that multiverse legend movies don't do?
All of this is most satisfying in the last episode. As mentioned earlier, the scope of the ending is indeed something else. If the show is if…? Inspired animation styles are not always just about the character in quiet moments (the face lacks detail, and the zombies usually look as if they are applying wounds), then when the action starts to flow, it does glow and develops bombarded anime quality. The ending is also good at building tensions and raising the stakes until the fate of the entire universe hangs in balance. This transitions to an ending, and although this may be split, feels real about the bleak, desperate nature of this universe. Although the first three episodes are formulaic in terms of plot, it is worth a try.