Marvel’s What If…? comics twist the stories of its heroes and villains outside official continuity, providing the opportunity to kill off characters and imagine particularly wacky or bleak versions of its universe. While the writers of the Disney Plus animated series What If…? used those stories as inspiration, they largely squandered the opportunity to take creative risks with the Marvel Cinematic Universe, ultimately abandoning the anthology format to focus on a multiversal team-up instead.
Thankfully, the spinoff miniseries Marvel Zombies actually lives up to the promise of What If through its graphic reimagining of some of the MCU’s biggest moments. Director Bryan Andrews continues the loose adaptation of Robert Kirkman’s Marvel Zombies comic series from What If season 1 with a twisty and emotional story about heroism in a broken world.
[Ed. note: This article contains some spoilers for Marvel Zombies]
Andrews and writer Zeb Wells take the somewhat ridiculous cliffhanger of “What If… Zombies?!” and uses it to retell the events of Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame. Like in Infinity War, the heroes converge on Wakanda to battle Thanos (in this case a zombie) in the hopes of saving the world. Multiple heroes sacrifice themselves in the fight, but their efforts are largely in vain as they fail to stop the zombie plague and instead set up an even greater threat to Earth.
While Endgame picks up five years later with the heroes seeking to use time travel to undo their failures, Marvel Zombies dwells on the aftermath. It makes excellent use of the MCU’s Phase Four heroes, offering new versions of their origin stories and demonstrating how they try to survive and dare to hope for a better future. Kamala Khan (Iman Vellani) received her magical bangle right before the plague broke, and Kate Bishop (Hailee Steinfeld) assumes the mantle of Hawkeye even as she’s hunted by zombified Clint Barton. Riri Williams (Dominique Thorne) is far more heroic here than in her own show, controlling the armor she took off Tony Stark’s headless corpse.
Characters taking a road trip through the zombie apocalypse in the hopes of finding a way to save the world is a tried and true cliche, but Vellani sells the youthful optimism that motivates her to make the journey when so many others have given up. The travel allows the show to provide looks at the way other heroes and villains have weathered the apocalypse. The series improves on Endgame’s version of a broken Thor (Greg Furman), avoiding playing his situation for laughs and instead painting him as a tragic, scarred figure. I wish Marvel Zombies had spent more time visiting S.H.I.E.L.D.’s underwater prison, the Raft, now run by Baron Zemo (Rama Vallury). It could have been a compelling way to examine the conflict between security and freedom found in many post-apocalyptic tales.
The show’s MA rating allows Andrews to unleash gore, but his fight scenes would be striking even without all the blood and guts. The concept of the Valley of the Fallen Gods, where deathless heroes are locked in eternal battle, provides a gorgeous excuse to wreck scenery and a clever subversion of the eternal comic book question of who would win in a fight? The long anticipated battle between Captain America and Red Guardian (David Harbour) is hilarious when Cap is a zombified, legless torso. In another converging plotline, Andrews combines aspects of action sequences from Ant-Man and the Wasp and Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings for a frantic scene depicting the first moments of the zombie apocalypse. In just a few minutes, Marvel Zombies offers a funny and heartfelt retelling of the origin of Shang-Chi (Simu Liu), whose father Xu Wenwu (Feodor Chin) demonstrates both his desire to protect his family and his callous disregard for anyone else.
Marvel Zombies improves on Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness, too, presenting a far more compelling version of a villainous Wanda Maximoff (Elizabeth Olsen) than Sam Raimi ever did. The zombie Scarlet Witch was a disturbing figure in “What If… Zombies?!” but she’s truly terrifying here as she takes on the role of the Queen of the Dead and pursues her goals with a mix of raw psychic power, clever tricks, and the seductive promise that it would just be so much easier to surrender.
What If…? should have been more ambitious, following the example of the comics to really explore how key characters could and plots could have been different rather than just focusing on Watcher politics or setting up goofy scenarios like Happy Hogan doing Die Hard. Marvel Zombies answers the question of what if Disney was willing to take more risks? Its bleak view of the MCU offers a glimpse at a more exciting future for the franchise.
