Marvel Zombies on Disney+: TV-MA First for Marvel Animation — Release Date, Cast, and What to Expect

Release date, where to watch, and why this one is different

Marvel Zombies lands on Disney+ on September 24, 2025, and Marvel is going all-in: all four episodes arrive the same day. No weekly wait, no cliffhanger grind. It’s a compact, binge-ready miniseries built to hit hard and fast.

This is Marvel Studios Animation’s first TV-MA series. That rating tells you the tone: more graphic, more intense, and more unsettling than past Marvel animated projects. If you’re thinking this will play like a standard MCU romp, reset expectations. The studio is leaning into horror, and it’s not shy about the blood and dread that come with a zombie outbreak among superpowered icons.

The show streams only on Disney+. Availability follows your region’s Disney+ rollout, and you’ll need an active subscription. Because it’s TV-MA, make sure your profile and parental controls are set accordingly if you share the account with younger viewers.

Helmed by showrunner and director Bryan Andrews with head writer Zeb Wells, the four-parter continues directly from What If...?’s breakout “What If... Zombies?!” episode. The animation again comes from Stellar Creative Lab, so expect that cel-shaded, comic-inspired look that matches What If...?—only pushed into darker territory.

Andrews has promised genuine surprises that marketing won’t spoil. In an August chat, he hinted there are turns the team deliberately kept under wraps so fans hit them cold. Put simply: the trailers are not the whole story.

The story, the cast, and the creative swing

The setup is simple and nasty: in an alternate timeline, the once-heroic Avengers and their allies have turned, carrying their powers into the apocalypse. The few survivors still breathing have to outsmart, outrun, and—when there’s no choice—fight supercharged undead. It’s survival horror with capes, and every decision matters because every wrong move can end the world for good.

This series pulls together a hefty cast of MCU regulars, many voicing their established roles. Here’s who’s in the mix:

• Awkwafina as Katy (Shang-Chi)
• David Harbour as Red Guardian
• Simu Liu as Shang-Chi
• Elizabeth Olsen as Wanda Maximoff
• Randall Park as Jimmy Woo
• Florence Pugh as Yelena Belova
• Paul Rudd as Scott Lang
• Wyatt Russell as John Walker
• Hailee Steinfeld as Kate Bishop
• Tessa Thompson as Valkyrie
• Dominique Thorne as Riri Williams
• Iman Vellani as Kamala Khan
• Todd Williams joins in a new role

That roster alone tells you the tone and scale. These are not side players. They come with powers and histories that matter in a crisis, and the series plays those strengths and flaws against the relentless threat of infection. If the What If...? episode teased how far the virus could spread, this miniseries lives in that world full-time.

Visually, the show keeps continuity with What If...?. Character silhouettes and action beats feel familiar, but there’s more weight in the movement and more dread in the framing. Expect the camera to linger on the risk and the aftermath. When a hero falls in a world like this, it’s not just a gag or a twist—it changes the math for everyone left alive.

Andrews and Wells are a fitting pairing for this jump into harder horror. Andrews, a veteran of What If...?, knows how to move fast inside Marvel’s multiverse rules without losing clarity. Wells, a longtime Marvel writer, has a knack for gallows humor and high-stakes storytelling. Together they’ve built a four-episode run that’s meant to be tight, propulsive, and, yes, nasty when it needs to be.

Marvel Zombies is part of Phase Six, which signals how Marvel now treats animation—not as a side dish, but as a formal arm of the MCU’s worldbuilding. The multiverse gives the studio room to play with tone and consequence. You can push a story to extremes without rewriting the core continuity, and that freedom is exactly why a TV-MA apocalypse fits here.

For fans of the comics, there’s lineage to appreciate. Marvel’s zombies first broke big in the mid-2000s with a run penned by Robert Kirkman and drawn by Sean Phillips, spinning out of an Ultimate Fantastic Four arc. That series mixed grim humor with brutal turns, and it became a cult favorite. The new show doesn’t adapt any single comics plot beat-for-beat, but it embraces the idea that power doesn’t vanish when a hero turns—it corrupts, complicates, and escalates.

Is it necessary to watch What If...?’s zombie episode first? It helps. You’ll step in already primed on how the infection spread and who was lost early on. But the miniseries is designed as its own ride. You’ll understand the stakes either way.

One big shift from typical MCU animation is how the series uses silence and dread. This isn’t wall-to-wall quips. There’s humor—these characters are still themselves—but the jokes don’t undercut the danger. The show lets moments breathe: the pause before a door opens, the scrape of something in the distance, the realization that a familiar power set on the wrong side of the fight is a nightmare scenario.

The binge model matters too. By dropping all four chapters at once, Marvel is betting you’ll stay strapped in, episode to episode, as momentum builds. That format suits a survival story. It mimics the feeling of a long night where you can’t stop moving, can’t stop planning, and can’t afford to miss the next turn.

What should you expect from the rating? Animated gore, intense peril, and themes that skew older—loss, sacrifice, and the cost of leadership when the rules no longer apply. If you’ve watched the imported Marvel live-action shows on Disney+ that carry TV-MA tags, you know the bar. This meets it in animated form.

Practical details to keep in mind:

• Premiere date: Wednesday, September 24, 2025
• Format: Four episodes, all released the same day
• Platform: Disney+ (subscription required)
• Creative leads: Bryan Andrews (showrunner/director), Zeb Wells (head writer)
• Animation: Stellar Creative Lab, matching the What If...? style
• Rating: TV-MA (set up parental controls if needed)

One last note on secrecy. Andrews has hinted that marketing hides several key swings—cameos, turns, or set pieces meant to shock. If you want those beats unspoiled, watch early. With all episodes landing at once, the conversation will move fast.

For now, the pitch is clear: a focused, four-part sprint through the worst day in an alternate MCU, powered by familiar heroes, pushed by horror rules, and framed by a studio finally ready to test the ceiling of its animated storytelling. If you’ve been waiting for Marvel to go darker without losing its identity, this is that moment.