The first card is almost entirely black, with the dripping “Marvel Zombies” logo fading from bone white into blood red and the words “The Winter Soldier” set underneath in cold chrome capitals, cut like a stencil. Marvel released it on Thursday during New York Comic Con, one of three title cards that went out with Brad Winderbaum’s announcement that “Marvel Zombies” is coming back to Disney+ as three two-part event series, one a year. “Marvel Zombies: The Winter Soldier” arrives for Halloween 2027, “Marvel Zombies: The Fist of Khonshu” follows in 2028, and “Marvel Zombies: The Last Guardian” closes the story in 2029. It is a slow way to tell a zombie story, three years of it, and it looks like a deliberate one.
Bryan Andrews, who co-created and directed last year’s four-episode series and directed the original “What If… Zombies?!” episode back in 2021, is back for all three. Winderbaum, who runs television, animation, comics and franchise at Marvel, kept nearly everything else to himself. There is no voice cast yet, no runtime, and no footage in Marvel’s own recap, just the three cards. He did say the team is “about halfway through animatics,” and that the result is “a blood-splattering good time, but it’s also quite beautiful.” Then he added, “I still can’t believe Disney+ lets us get away with it.” Warning beyond this point there are spoilers for the ending of “Marvel Zombies” and for who is still standing in its world.
It is a slow way to tell a zombie story, three years of it, and it looks like a deliberate one.”
The other two cards are dressed for different movies. On “The Fist of Khonshu,” the logo turns an icy, moonlit blue, and the subtitle sits in silver inside a long rounded frame, with the O in Khonshu swapped for a thin crescent moon. On “The Last Guardian,” the logo runs from violet into hot pink above gold capitals, and TheWrap noticed that the lettering borrows the “Guardians of the Galaxy” font. A color scheme costs almost nothing, so it is easy to read too much into one. Still, three palettes for three chapters suggest that Marvel is selling each special as its own small film, not as the next two episodes of a show.
The first one is the easiest to read, because Winderbaum read it for the crowd. “This is going to talk about Bucky, where he’s been during the adventure from last year, and has some real big surprises in it,” he said, according to ComicBook.com’s transcript. Bucky Barnes (Sebastian Stan) was one of the last survivors in “What If… Zombies?!” in 2021. Late in that episode, a zombified Wanda Maximoff (Elizabeth Olsen) flung him clear of the fight, and nobody ever saw where he came down. He never turned up in the series either. In September of last year, Andrews told Brandon Davis of Phase Hero that “We know what’s going on with certain people that didn’t even appear in this thing,” and that the story was so big “there was no way to put it all together.” A Bucky special looks like that held back material, finally given a slot of its own.
“The Fist of Khonshu” is stranger. That is the old comics name for the moon god’s chosen avatar, and in “Marvel Zombies” the avatar was Blade Knight (Todd Williams), a version of Blade who took up the Moon Knight mantle after the previous Moon Knight died. Then, in the finale, a zombified Thor killed him. Khonshu is a god and has never needed any one man, so the title promises the mantle without promising whoever wears it next, and Marvel has not said who that is, maybe because the answer is the surprise.
Then there is “The Last Guardian,” which Winderbaum would not touch. “I won’t tell you who the Last Guardian is, but it’s very, very exciting,” he said. The series, though, already narrowed the field. In a flashback in its third episode, a zombified Thanos killed Rocket and Groot in Wakanda, and the Thor who fought beside them came back at the end as one of the dead. Marvel’s recap says the story “will conclude in 2029” with this one, so the last chapter of the whole saga is built around a name Marvel will not say yet. Marvel has also not said whether any of the three picks up Kamala Khan (Iman Vellani), who gave in to Wanda in the finale and woke up in a world that looked fixed, until the real Riri Williams (Dominique Thorne) hacked in to tell her that none of it was real.
The studio calculus is easier to follow than the plot. “Marvel Zombies” was first conceived as a film before it became a four-episode “mini-movie event,” in Andrews’s words. It was also the first Marvel Studios Animation series rated TV-MA, which is why Winderbaum can joke about what Disney+ lets them do. Andrews told Variety it was ready for Halloween 2024, but Marvel held it so it would not compete with “Agatha All Along,” because, in his words, “we don’t want to have one eat the other attention-level-wise.” It was then dated for early October 2025 and pulled forward to late September. When it landed, it topped the Disney+ most-watched list in the U.S. for its first three days, despite a middling 66 percent from critics on Rotten Tomatoes.
That history sits behind a quiet change in language. In April, Winderbaum said on The Escape Pod podcast that he had seen “the first animatic of the first episode of Marvel Zombies season 2,” and that it delivered “on like an MCU thing that has never really happened before.” Marvel’s own recap of Thursday’s panel is still tagged “Marvel Zombies | Season 2,” and the three logo files on its site carry an “s2” in their names. So this is probably that same second season, cut into three pieces and parked on the calendar where Marvel has wanted a horror title since “Werewolf by Night” became its first Halloween special in October 2022. Our read is that a two-parter every October is easier to sell than a four-episode season every few years, since it gives Disney+ a seasonal event, like the old network holiday specials that Marvel’s Special Presentation banner was built to echo. Marvel has not said whether these three will carry that banner.
The risk is the wait. Fans left Kamala in a fake world last September, and a story that Marvel says ends in 2029 might not get back to her until the very end, which is a long time to hold a cliffhanger for a show that dropped all four episodes at once. There is also the chance that two parts a year is too thin a slice for a world this crowded, where every new chapter has to introduce its hero and kill half the cast in the same night. Winderbaum did not sound worried. With animatics halfway done and the first special a year away, the bigger question is not whether the dead will rise on schedule, but whether people will still be waiting for them in 2029.
What Do You Think? Who do you think the Last Guardian is? Would you rather have had a regular second season than three specials spread over three years? And who should be the new Fist of Khonshu after Blade Knight?
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