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Marvel Zombies has plenty of gore but no guts

Fresh-faced Avengers assemble before the meat grinder in this Disney+ miniseries.

By Jarrod Jones | September 24, 2025 | 7:00am

Image: Marvel Television

TV Reviews Marvel Zombies

Marvel Zombies has plenty of gore but no guts

Shambling onto Disney+ just in time for Halloween, Marvel Zombies reimagines the popular five-issue horror series of the same name within the increasingly cumbersome Cinematic Universe. Iconic heroes and villains have become flesh-hungry super-ghouls, leaving Marvel’s post-Endgame second-stringers, each with their own tentative franchises, to save the world. The result is an ambitious, if busy and ceaselessly quippy, miniseries that demands some labor from its viewers. Without keeping meticulous pace with MCU Phases Four to Six, several open Wikipedia tabs might be needed to understand who’s who and why they matter. That’s Marvel Zombies: a TV-MA spectacle rife with squishy sound effects and digital viscera, with stakes intelligible only to the canon obsessed.

To enjoy it, one must also accept the conceit that a zombie outbreak could indiscriminately affect the MCU’s most powerful players. No healing factor, no alien origin, no super-soldier serum can protect against it—aside from one convenient and spoilery exception. Worse for the survivors, the infected keep their powers and a degree of intelligence. For instance, Zombie Hawkeye can still put an arrow through a target’s eye socket if he so wishes. One sequence shows how Thanos might have wielded the Infinity Gauntlet as a flesh-craving beast, and the difference to the more lucid Josh Brolin version isn’t as striking as you’d expect (quieter maybe). Marvel Zombies is at its strongest when the undead weaponize their powers to gruesome, zombie-splatting effect.

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Created by Bryan Andrews (What If…?) and Zeb Wells (fresh from a divisive run on the Spider-Man comics), the series is a vividly hued, antiseptically polished facsimile of the MCU that leans excessively on its snarky post-Whedon cadence. At this Phase in Marvel’s run (Six for those keeping score), many of its foundational stars have since moved on or have reskinned as new characters, making its fresh-faced legacy cast feel like a test assembly for Avengers: Doomsday. There’s Kamala Khan (Iman Vellani), a.k.a. Ms. Marvel, the heart of the series and its ersatz Frodo Baggins. And her fellowship is comprised of Yelena Belova (Florence Pugh), Red Guardian (David Harbour), Shang-Chi (Simu Liu), Katy (Awkwafina), and, later, Spider-Man (Hudson Thames), with the villainous Baron Zemo (Daniel Brühl) skulking around the periphery.

Their epic quest begins with Kamala and her crew of Young Avengers (Hailee Steinfeld’s Hawkeye and Dominique Thorne’s Ironheart) living in a bombed-out Manhattan, where they stumble across the series’ MacGuffin: a “subspace transmitter” shrunk by Pym particles. This discovery compels them to crack the secrets of “Project: Lifeshot,” a mysterious last-ditch effort to reverse the zombie plague. After some perfunctory bickering about their chances of finding the nearest S.H.I.E.L.D. outpost—Ironheart locates one in Ohio, which is quite a jaunt—they agree with a fist-bump to head out and save the world.

Naturally, obstacles arise. Most of the planet’s shamblers are remote-controlled by a zombified Scarlet Witch (Elizabeth Olsen), who also wants the subspace doo-dad for hidden reasons. Despite their sinister, crimson eyes and tremendous numbers, her army pops up wherever the story needs them to. And before the first episode ends, Kamala has been separated from her pals by a surprise horde, leaving her in the enigmatic company of Blade (Todd Williams), the day-walking vampire avatar of Konshu and this universe’s Moon Knight, who aids Ms. Marvel on her way to S.H.I.E.L.D., where they hope the MacGuffin will do some good.

Like nearly every MCU entry that precedes it, Marvel Zombies is a quips-first genre exercise, and it’s difficult to invest in any of it emotionally. Its stakes shift from moment to moment, like when Kamala and Blade meet a faction of Black Widows who control a battalion of zombies of their own through the power of science. Which zombies should our heroes fear? All of them? None of them? Everyone takes the walking dead, not to mention the fall of society, in stride. Nameless human shields protect the more established characters from death and/or dismemberment, which saps danger from the premise until each successively frantic action scene feels more obligatory than exciting.

The drama buckles under boilerplate platitudes, delivered by uncanny CG faces with creepy teeth and eyebrows that constantly wriggle like restless caterpillars. (After one noble sacrifice, someone cools their comic routine long enough to declare, “We will honor [them] by taking this planet back from the dead!”) Whenever there’s a dilemma or an enemy to defeat, Blade, clearly meant to farm aura well ahead of whenever his live-action MCU debut is supposed to take place, mentally calculates a solution or slices the latest sub-boss to bloody bits. The braintrust behind Marvel Zombies has clearly seen a monster movie or two, and they feel confident exploiting its tropes. But harnessing the genre’s morbid sense of doom requires an anarchic approach that risk-averse Marvel Studios does not permit.

The biggest problem with Marvel Zombies is tonal whiplash. One minute, the show dabbles in Endgame grandiosity; the next, it veers into Love And Thunder frippery. One wonders who it’s made for. Helicopter parents probably won’t let their kids watch the cartoon bloodshed, and longtime Marvel followers might grow weary of its heroes’ smug overconfidence. Casual viewers may find it faintly diverting, while horror hounds might consider its zombie carnage too sterile. Four half-hour episodes with a cast this size isn’t enough time to explore the dramatic headspace of these characters, so dialogue is reduced to blunt emotions or villainous intent. And since these folks have yet to assemble in the live-action MCU, Zombies is in the unenviable position of experimenting with their chemistry, and the resulting alchemy proves alarmingly inert. Even with the zombie apocalypse there to spice up their lives, Marvel’s newest heroes are less lively than the arm-munchers surrounding them.

Marvel Zombies premieres September 24 on Disney+