Spinning out of the "What If... Zombies?!" episode of Marvel's What If...? and based on the comic book saga that originated in a 2005 issue of Ultimate Fantastic Four, the new series is essentially a movie split into four parts.
"Originally, we were thinking it'd be a movie. Like, 'Ooh, we should release it as a movie,'" director Bryan Andrews told the outlet. "'We should just do a movie.' But there were some things that came up, certain issues that we just had to kind of, 'Let's break it [up]. We'll have to break it up into four episodes.'"
"So basically it's like a four-episode mini-event, like a film broke up into four parts," he added, confirming it's "one story" unlike the anthology series What If...?, which ended after three seasons in 2024.
Andrews also directed "What If... Zombies?!," which followed a cloak-wearing Spider-Man (voiced by Hudson Thames), the Hulk (Mark Ruffalo), King T'Challa (Chadwick Boseman), and the severed head of Ant-Man (Paul Rudd) as survivors of the zombie apocalypse in a mish-mash of 2018's Ant-Man and the Wasp and Avengers: Infinity War.
The episode saw zombified versions of heroes like Wanda Maximoff/the Scarlet Witch, Steve Rogers/Captain America (Josh Keaton), and Tony Stark/Iron Man become flesh-munching monsters after Hope van Dyne/Wasp (Evangeline Lilly) contracted a quantum virus that spread across the globe as patient zero of the zombie apocalypse.
Unlike that episode, however, Marvel Zombies will be rated TV-MA. "It was Kevin [Feige, producer and president of Marvel Studios] that really pushed for doing something with the zombies," Andrews said. "And it turned out well."
"I think once the response came in, when people saw the episode, I think that helped seal the deal" for a Marvel Zombies spinoff series, Andrews continued. "Relatively soon after [What If...?], it was, 'Well, we got to do another one.'" Brad Winderbaum, Head of Marvel Television and Marvel Animation, suggested that instead of another zombie episode of What If...?, "It should be like its own thing, and hence the beginning of us figuring out what on Earth to do."
While plot details remain in the grave, MCU stars Elizabeth Olsen (Wanda Maximoff/the Scarlet Witch), Florence Pugh (Yelena Belova), Simu Liu (Shang-Chi), Awkwafina (Katy), Randall Park (Jimmy Woo), David Harbour (Alexei Shostakov/the Red Guardian), Hailee Steinfeld (Kate Bishop/Hawkeye), Iman Vellani (Kamala Khan/Ms. Marvel), and Dominique Thorne (Riri Williams/Ironheart) are confirmed to voice their respective characters, with Hudson Thames (Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man) voicing Peter Parker.
"It's TV-MA, so we don't have to pull punches," Andrews said in the show's press notes. "We can be a little bit more hardcore. We go for the throat -- no pun intended. It's pretty wild, pretty out there." Added Winderbaum, "In many ways, animation is the most direct access you'll ever have to a filmmaker's imagination. If you can conjure it in your mind, you can put it onscreen. Marvel Zombies is proof of that. It's not just a zombie story, it's a sweeping adventure -- one with themes of hope and despair, and that's what you want from a rich zombie story."