MCU Rights Disaster Forced a Shocking Marvel Zombies Overhaul
Spider-Man swings into Marvel Zombies, but a rights snag took a bite out of the original plan. Executive producers Brad Winderbaum and Bryan Andrews reveal the MCU-driven change that reshaped the four-episode Disney+ series ahead of its September 24 premiere.
Marvel Zombies was almost a movie. Then Spider-Man happened. The show you are about to binge on Disney+ got reshaped into a four-part animated series because of one of those inside-baseball rights puzzles that always seem to orbit the wall-crawler.
The Spider-Man wrinkle that reshaped the project
Executive producers Brad Winderbaum and Bryan Andrews have been open about this: Andrews previously said Marvel Zombies started life as a film. Now Winderbaum, speaking on Who Let Us Out, connected the dots and confirmed why it pivoted to TV. Because Spider-Man is split between Marvel and Sony, Marvel Studios Animation can use him in half-hour animation, but a feature-length thing would have been a different rights ballgame. So the big, single story got broken into chapters.
"For Spider-Man, we have certain rights to the character, and Sony has other rights to the character. So we can use Spider-Man in a half-hour animation, which is why we are able to make Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man as well. But that meant that we had to take our big epic story and break it into four chapters, which I actually think helped the storytelling."
That is both an explanation and, honestly, a neat creative silver lining. If you are wondering about more characters in the future, Winderbaum says there are plenty they still want to use and hopes they get to tell those stories if they make more. Andrews kept it coy: no spoilers, but they do have ideas if they get to go back for another round.
What this series actually is
Marvel Zombies takes place in an alternate MCU reality where a fresh lineup of heroes is trying to outrun (and outfight) an expanding zombie outbreak. It spins out of What If...? Season 1, Episode 5, the one that imagines the events around Ant-Man and the Wasp and Avengers: Infinity War veering into a full-on zombie apocalypse. Andrews is directing again, Zeb Wells wrote the scripts and is also an executive producer, and they are promising zombie action that is "more hardcore" and "pretty wild" compared to the What If...? episode.
The four-episode season starts streaming on Disney+ on September 24.
Who is in it
- Awkwafina (Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings) as Katey
- David Harbour (Thunderbolts*) as Alexei Shostakov/Red Guardian
- Simu Liu (Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings) as Shang-Chi
- Elizabeth Olsen (WandaVision) as Scarlet Witch
- Randall Park (WandaVision) as Jimmy Woo
- Florence Pugh (Thunderbolts*) as Yelena Belova
- Hailee Steinfeld (Hawkeye) as Kate Bishop
- Dominique Thorne (Ironheart) as Riri Williams
- Iman Vellani (The Marvels) as Kamala Khan/Ms. Marvel
- Hudson Thames (What If...?) as Spider-Man
Short version: the show kept Spider-Man by becoming a miniseries, and the creative team thinks the story is better for it. Rare W for the rights maze.