Marvel Zombies Only Got 4 Episodes — The Real Reason Won’t Surprise You
Marvel Zombies hit Disney+ with just four episodes for a simple reason, co-creator Bryan Andrews says: production limits. In a new interview, the director explains the team poured resources into scope and polish instead of padding the episode count.
If you blitzed through 'Marvel Zombies' on Disney+ and wondered why it tapped out at four episodes, you are not alone. The short version: the answer is exactly what you think it is, plus a little Marvel rights gymnastics.
Why it was only four
Director and co-creator Bryan Andrews told Variety that the season length boiled down to production realities. Time and money, basically. They were building the show without a fixed endpoint, then discovered the ceiling mid-flight.
'Time and money. It was, Hey, this is all you got... We were creating a thing and didn't know what the limit was going to be.'
So the team carved the story into a compact run. Not a creative preference, just the logistics of animation schedules and budgets doing what they do.
It was almost a movie
Here’s the inside baseball part: Andrews says the original plan was a feature film. They wanted a big, two-to-two-and-a-half-hour zombie epic. Then reality walked in wearing a red-and-blue suit. Because the story included Spider-Man, Sony’s Spider-Man rules kicked in, and that torpedoed the movie route. No feature, no dice. Pivot to streaming series.
How they made the pivot work
Once the movie idea died, the team reframed the project as four chapters of a book. Andrews liked what they pulled off in the tighter format, but admits they would have loved a little more elbow room to slow down for the quieter character beats. As it stands, the episodes are lean and fast by design.
What they left on the table (and what could be next)
Even with the constraints, Andrews says Marvel Animation laid track for future stories. There is a lot they did not get to use, and he and Marvel’s Brad [Winderbaum] already know how a follow-up would start. Fun tidbit: an early version leaned into a medieval fantasy vibe before they scaled it back to keep the heroes looking like, well, the heroes you recognize.
Nothing is official, but Andrews suggests that strong audience response could convince Marvel to throw more time and resources at a second season. Translation: if you want more, watch it, talk about it, make some noise.
The comments came via Variety; the initial pickup was by Vritti Johar at SuperHeroHype.