Marvel Zombies review: "A fun expansion of the What If episode with delightful MCU Easter eggs and truly gross R-rated kills"

Marvel Zombies is coming at a weird time, not just for the MCU, but for zombie stories as a whole. When the comic debuted in 2005, spinning out of a story in Marvel’s Ultimate Universe, it was written by the red-hot Walking Dead creator Robert Kirkman and was a thrilling, and often darkly comic expansion of zombie lore, featuring superpowered, extremely chatty flesh-eaters. 20 years later, and we have a very loose adaptation debuting all four episodes today on Disney Plus, itself a belated sequel to a 2021-debuting episode of What If…?

Add in a general malaise about the MCU itself, a cooling towards zombie properties (28 Years Later excepted), and the point is that there’s a lot working against the four-episode series. So, credit where it's due: despite some hiccups here and there, Marvel Zombies is a fun expansion of the world introduced back in 2021, with some delightful Easter eggs for MCU fans, and some truly gross R-rated kills throughout.

Back to the undead

The plot picks up after the end of that What If…? episode, with a zombie virus let loose on the world, leading to a post-apocalypse that liberally picks from the aforementioned 28 Days/Weeks/Years franchise, as well as everything from Mad Max Fury Road to (not post-apocalypse, but still) Lord of the Rings. While the show eventually wraps back to the exact fallout, literally and figuratively, of the What If…? episode, which powers the final two episodes of the "season," we start with a team-up fans have been asking for, for a long time: Kamala Khan/Ms. Marvel (Iman Vellani), Riri Williams/Ironheart (Dominique Thorne), and Kate Bishop/Hawkeye (Hailee Steinfeld).

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In fact, if the show had stuck with the adventures of these Young Avengers in the zombie post-apocalypse, it might have been an overall more delightful series. While some of the voice work is stronger than others – Vellani is the main star of the show, and keeps the action well anchored, while Thorne occasionally comes off as somnambulant – seeing these characters pal around and hang out is charming, along with F.R.I.D.A.Y. (Kerry Condon), who has been placed inside of a headless Iron Man armor that has been attached to a dilapidated teddy bear head.

But the shaggy hang-out vibe of the first episode is supplanted by a bigger "save the world" mission that never quite carries the gravitas the show wants to convey. The issue with this sort of plot – curing a zombie infection – in a zombie show or movie is that, frankly, the world is so much more interesting to watch with the zombies. While you want to feel for the characters and see them survive, getting rid of the separation between our world and theirs (i.e., the undead) always contains a nugget of: what if they don't? It’s less about creating endless sequels, or the shambling mess that The Walking Dead franchise has often been accused of becoming, so much as reverting to regular society brings your zombie fiction down to resource management, versus the gnarly kills and decomposing flesh we've tuned in for.

Bloodthirsty action (and a ton of quips)

That's tilting at windmills, though, because Marvel Zombies does have a mission to save the world plot that builds to a Battle of Helm's Deep-style crescendo in the final episode. And in that, like What If…? before it – Marvel Zombies employs the same cel-shaded animation, versus the more traditional 2D animation of X-Men '97 or the faux-comic book style of Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man – the action rocks. We won't spoil all the big fights or cameos in the show, because that's part of the fun. But in particular, a battle deep underground in episode 3 featuring a match-up between two Marvel characters we've never seen fight in the MCU before is frickin' cool. And that final battle mentioned above builds exponentially, and employs the classic Kirby crackle in a way that looks stellar around another surprise MCU character.

More wobbly is the humor throughout the show. All four episodes are written by Zeb Wells, off of a story by Wells and Bryan Andrews. Wells is an old hand at this sort of thing, having written multiple titles for Marvel Comics, including a long run on Amazing Spider-Man, as well as writing or co-writing on She-Hulk: Attorney at Law, The Marvels, and Deadpool & Wolverine in the MCU. And while you get the classic off-hand quips from the aforementioned trio, as well as Simu Liu as Shang-Chi, Awkwafina as Katy, and Randall Park as Jimmy Woo, at a certain point given the stakes everyone is dealing with and the massive death they’ve experienced, you sort of wish they would stop doing "so… that just happened" style "jokes" for at least a few minutes.

Is humor important as a release valve in the midst of danger? For sure. But, for example, the second episode presents a dire, claustrophobic situation involving a surprising MCU location now run by Baron Zemo (voiced by Rama Vallury, taking over for Daniel Brühl), which never reaches any level of actual tension because everyone cannot stop quipping.

MCU obstacles

There are other bits of weirdness, too, like the appearance of Blade, who is now also Moon Knight somehow. Mahershala Ali was announced as Blade in 2019, and subsequently has run into multiple stumbling blocks in launching his Blade reboot. To see the character incongruously here, not as a half-vampire daywalker, but as Moon Knight (the whole half-vampire thing plays into the action approximately zero times), another character who hasn't popped up since 2022, takes you out of the series rather than providing a thrilling debut. And given that Ali doesn't even voice the character, it's actor Todd Williams instead… This is likely not the introduction of Blade MCU fans have been salivating for.

Similarly, while Elizabeth Olsen turns in stellar work as Wanda Maximoff, this show is far less successful as a big return for the Scarlet Witch fans have been demanding. And after the MCU high-point of WandaVision, everything since, from Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness to her villain turn here in Marvel Zombies has been diminishing returns. Heck, they don't even hit the "I just want my kids back" emotional plot beat of Doctor Strange 2 – Wanda is barely fleshed out in this series (no pun intended).

But all that is external to the show itself, expectations and baggage we bring from outside the production. As is, while Marvel Zombies might not be the franchise-launcher that the comic was 20 years ago, it is another pleasantly engaging four-episode diversion with some lovely animation, just like Eyes of Wakanda was a month and change prior.

Perhaps the show would have worked better if it had expanded the episode count and channeled The Walking Dead's ongoing storytelling, versus Avengers: Endgame level stakes for the entire world. But if you are looking for Blade Knight to slice a zombie into pieces, or your fave MCU characters sacrifice themselves in a bloody blaze of glory… Well, shamble on over to the ol’ Disney Plus, because Marvel Zombies is streaming now.

Marvel Zombies is streaming on Disney Plus now. For more, check out our guides on all the upcoming Marvel movies and shows or how to watch the Marvel movies in order.