What If…? spin-off Marvel Zombies was once planned to be a movie, until its showrunner was told of Sony’s rules around featuring the character of Spider-Man.
Sony owns the film rights to Marvel’s web-slinging comicbook hero, and has strict limitations on when and how the character can be used. This means that Sony can, for instance, release feature-length animated Spider-Man movies — such as its Into the Spider-Verse saga — but Marvel cannot.
The realisation of this by Marvel Zombies’ production team meant the project ended up being made as a four-part Disney+ mini-series instead, showrunner Bryan Andrews has told Variety, despite hopes for more screentime.
Asked why the well-received Marvel Zombies was limited to just four half-hour episodes, Andrews said it was all “time and money, man.”
“It’s ‘Hey, this is all you got.’ We’re like, ‘Oh shit! All right.’ We were creating a thing and didn’t know what the limit was going to be. Then they’re like, ‘Oh no, no, guys.’ Then we thought, ‘Well, let’s make it a movie.’ We were going to make it a movie and have it released.
“It should be an epic,” Andrews said of Marvel Zombies’ movie ambitions. “It’s gonna be two, two and a half hours long. It’s gonna be amazing. But, there were contractual issues because of Spider-Man in it. So, there are Sony rules that come into play. We were like, ‘Oh shit, that’s a thing? Oh no, okay, I guess we can’t do that.’ So we broke it up.
“Now, it plays like four chapters in a book. Even with the four chapters, it would have been awesome if we had more time to make each installment a little bit longer, just so we could milk those quiet moments a bit longer. We tried to put it in as much as possible, and it moves at a breakneck pace. We put in those moments of stillness and reflection as best we could. Maybe next time around, if everyone loves it enough and yells online enough to demand more, maybe they’ll give us more time and more money.”
As part of the same interview, Andrews revealed that Zombies was made around the same time as What If…? Season 3, and that Marvel had sat on Zombies’ release for some time, as the series had effectively been ready since last year’s launch of Agatha: All Along. Zombies’ launch was pushed back, however, to avoid the two shows cannabilising each other’s attention.
Last week, Brad Winderbaum, head of streaming, television and animation at Marvel Studios, told IGN that Marvel Zombies had initially been developed “believing that there would be a Blade movie out well before.”
Of course, as we now know, that didn’t turn out to be the case — despite numerous attempts by Marvel to get the Mahershala Ali-starring Blade project off the ground, sometimes at a relatively late stage. Ultimately, as uncertainty over the live-action movie continued, Winderbaum’s animation team were forced to pivot their own plans for the character, and ultimately land on the Fists of Khonshu version of Blade that’s featured in Marvel Zombies now. Voiced by Invincible and Starfield veteran Todd Williams, Marvel Zombies’ Blade stole the show in the series’ trailers.
“Marvel Zombies may be formulaic at times, but the series succeeds by giving us exactly what the MCU hasn’t in recent years,” IGN wrote in our Marvel Zombies review. “The fun character dynamics and the fact that the series is far better than the regular MCU at building bonds among the various Phase 4 and 5 characters are enough to make Marvel Zombies worth watching.”
Tom Phillips is IGN’s News Editor. You can reach Tom at tom_phillips@ign.com or find him on Bluesky @tomphillipseg.bsky.social
