'People Die Rough': Marvel Zombies Earns Its TV-MA Rating, Director Teases

Marvel Zombies promises to deliver the best tropes of zombie stories but with a twist; fans get to see MCU heroes and villains decimated in horrific death scenes.

Marvel’s What If…? series offered MCU stories from truly unique perspectives. While the episodes remained threaded into MCU canon with alternate arcs, the show still went all out with its wildly speculative episodes. In Season 1, Episode 5, “What If… Zombies?!” took a dark turn from neatly wrapped MCU stories and went the route of the darker DC animated movies. With a Marvel Zombies spin-off show confirmed, the studio is expected to release its most mature series yet. Speaking with Marvel.com (via The Direct), director Bryan Andrews confirms as much by teasing “hardcore death scenes” that could be similar to the carnage in Justice League Dark: Apokolips War.

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Andrews elaborated on Marvel Zombies‘ TV-MA rating by teasing the gruesome deaths of its characters. “Well, it’s going to be pretty awesome,” he asserted. “I mean it’s TV-MA, it’s hardcore. People die. And they die rough.” He did maintain the show will still have the moments of levity typical of all MCU releases. “So, there’s still some laughs to be found here and there. It’s not completely all horrible… We might prop you up with some laughs and some humor and some good times, and then and then we take stuff away. So, it’s pretty brutal. There’s huge action. There’s great emotion. There’s drama. There’s all of it.”

Marvel Zombies Series Will Be Different From The Comic

Andrews has asserted the series is inspired by the comic but will tell a different story. “…We’re not doing the comic, like, in any stretch,” he told Phase Zero. “We have our own take on it, and a lot of that stuff has been set up by our talented [What If…?] writers early on, so, just taking that and… exploring that mythology in that episode a bit more.” It’s yet to be seen how the series will pick up from where the What If…? episode left off, and fans can’t help but speculate how the story would adapt the themes of the comics. It’s also surprising that Marvel Studios beat DC Animated with a zombie-based release, considering the latter already had its own source material in Tom Taylor’s DCeased: Dead Planet.

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“I can’t wait for when people finally start to see or tease that stuff,” Andrews added. “But I just hope we don’t give stuff away because I think there’s a lot of honest surprises throughout. And I think people going in colder would be a lot better.” The Marvels‘ Iman Vellani has somewhat beaten Andrews to the punch, though, confirming her character Ms. Marvel would be the “Frodo” of the series. “Kamala is kind of the center of the show,” she said. They described it to me, it’s like, ‘She’s basically the Frodo of the story.'”

Marvel Zombies premieres on Disney+ but has yet to set a release date.

Source: Marvel.com (via The Direct)