Marvel Zombies Review

I was very excited to see what Marvel were going to pull out of the bag when it came to Marvel Zombies. A spin-off of one of the most widely enjoyed What If…? episodes, and based on one of Marvel’s most notoriously gruesome comic book series – what could possibly go wrong? Well, it seems that as we creep ever closer to Avengers: Doomsday, Marvel are determined to let fans down at just about every possible turn. I have no idea how a show with such a unique premise ended up feeling this soulless, but it’s time to talk about it.

Today, it’s time for our Marvel Zombies review. I’ll be avoiding spoilers for this review, so feel free to read ahead if you’re looking to check the show out for yourself! However, as you can probably tell, I don’t recommend spending your time watching this unless you’re a true Marvel completionist. With that being said, let’s get into the review.

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Marvel Zombies Review

Image by Marvel Studios Animation

When it comes to Marvel, you can usually tell how much effort they’re putting into an MCU story based on its medium. If it’s a movie, they’re giving it their all. They may swing big, and miss entirely, but at least they swing big. Their streaming series can usually be categorised based on how many episodes they give to them. At the very bottom of the barrel lies their 20-minute, 4-episode long mini-series’, which is right where Marvel Zombies finds itself. From the jump, there’s a sense that this show is an absolute throwaway. I wish the series didn’t eventually prove this worrying premonition correct, but unfortunately, it does.

From its first episode, Marvel Zombies makes it infinitely clear that it’s here to be ‘edgy Marvel’, and do little else with its flashbang runtime. However, funnily enough, it’s not the blood, the guts, or the occasional jumpscares that makes Marvel Zombies feel like an attempt to shock its audience. Rather, Marvel Zombies is given an edgy atmosphere based purely on how much death happens in it. It feels like the characters in Marvel Zombies are constantly grieving someone, to the point that the frequent intermissions of sad piano music as we watched a character either die, or reflect on someone else dying, bordered on comedic by the time we reached the finale.

Now to be fair to the production element of Marvel Zombies, there’s a lot of action to enjoy here. Each episode features lengthy action sequences, allowing Marvel to shine at one of the few things they still do very well. However, for the most part, the most awe-inspiring, coolest shots in Marvel Zombies were, believe it or not, shown in the trailer! After watching through all four episodes of this series, my two favourite action scenes remain Blade cutting up Ghost, and Spider-Man using his webs to rip off a ton of zombie heads at once. There’s no pleasant surprises in store here for fans who watched the trailer for Marvel Zombies, which is a real disappointment.

Image by Marvel Studios Animation

What doesn’t disappoint is the animation of the series, which again proves that though Marvel is certainly lacking in many fields, production quality is pretty well-maintained, at least when it comes to their animated projects. Good animation enhances the quality of the show’s action sequences, so it’s a very important element to get right, and luckily they do. The zombies are impressively designed, with them feeling genuinely unsettling at certain points in the series. Despite everything else I’m going to call it, I can’t call Marvel Zombies lazy. From a production standpoint, effort has been made.

All of this effort though, all of the good work that the team at Marvel Studios Animation do on Marvel Zombies, is backed up by practically nothing. I can say wholeheartedly that I did not care about a single person in this show. Not even the return of the Scarlet Witch, my favourite Marvel character, was enough to move me. At this point, I think I’m done expecting Marvel to actually do anything of substance with the material they have to work with. Again, some of this felt like backdoor promotion of Yelena, a character we already like. This was an opportunity to revisit wasted characters of the past, highlight the heroes who never got a chance to shine. Blade himself is so side-lined in this series that it’s not even funny.

Marvel Zombies, as is the case with a lot of recent Marvel projects, is all about the flashiness, all style and absolutely zero substance. There is little to no heart on display here. Were this an original concept, and not based on a fairly infamous comic book series, then I could give it points for originality, but that’s not the case. In fact, seeing how they interpreted this comic makes me extremely worried for not only Avengers: Doomsday, but especially Avengers: Secret Wars. There was a sense of ‘look, here’s the characters you like’ going on in this show, rather than Marvel actually doing anything with the characters to make you enjoy them, and if that doesn’t tell you to worry about the upcoming Avengers movies, then I don’t know what will.

Image by Marvel Studios Animation

Part of this is probably thanks to the ridiculous amount of characters we run into throughout Marvel Zombies. There’s not nearly enough time for this show to deal with Ms. Marvel, Kate Bishop, Ironheart, Red Guardian, Yelena, Spider-Man, Blade, Ant-Man, Shang-Chi, Scarlet Witch and many more – and yet, it decides that that’s exactly what it’s going to do. As a result, no character is fleshed-out at all, and all of them rely completely on you already being a fan of them from previous Marvel projects. You’re not meant to actually appreciate Spider-Man’s character in this show, you’re meant to point at the screen and say ‘yay, Spider-Man’s here!’. This seems to be the way Marvel are writing their releases now, so again, I ask you – is that huge cast list for Avengers: Doomsday still something you’re excited about?

To be clear, from a production standpoint, the series is very solid, so I don’t want to say it’s one of the worst things I’ve ever seen. The issue is that I’m a big fan of Marvel, and particularly the MCU, and it seems that the team over there has completely given up on trying to do anything aside from attempt to meet expectations. They’re certainly not exceeding them, but at this point, it feels like a struggle to even give fans what they’re expecting. Nothing feels special anymore when it comes to Marvel, everything is just a soulless distraction from the fact that the franchise is slowly in decay. I’m not sure what to think of how Marvel Zombies ended, but if they’re even thinking about a second season, they need to go back to the drawing-board.

Image by Marvel Studios Animation

As much as it may ignite controversy to do this, I’m going to directly compare Marvel Zombies to Creature Commandos – Marvel Zombies is not canon to the events of the MCU, and James Gunn has insisted that you don’t need to watch the DCU’s mini-series to understand the main storyline, so in many ways, these two shows are on similar footing. I wasn’t crazy about Creature Commandos, but at the very least, the show had a lot of heart, and didn’t feel like wasted time by the end of it. Even if those characters never appear in the DCU, the experience was memorable enough to justify its existence as a DCU show. Marvel Zombies, on the other hand, was a complete waste of my, and Marvel’s, time.

Between this series, and the recently released Eyes of Wakanda that I didn’t even bother reviewing, Marvel needs to realise that there’s no point in pumping money and energy into an animation studio if all they’re going to put out is mediocrity. Animation, in particular, is the medium where creativity and heart should be allowed to thrive. If Marvel Zombies is anything to go by, then perhaps Marvel don’t see animation this way, and rather, see it as a less expensive medium to tell half-baked stories with little to no heart. This series was a huge letdown, but let’s look on the bright side – things can only go up from here.

What did you think of Marvel Zombies? Do you agree with our thoughts? Be sure to let us know in the comments, and thanks for reading!

See also: Absolute Wonder Woman #12 Review

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Where to Watch Marvel Zombies?

Image by Marvel Studios Animation

Marvel Zombies released on Disney+ on September 24, 2025, and you can watch all four episodes streaming exclusively on the platform. Keep an eye out for more Marvel Studios Animation projects coming soon to the streaming service.

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