Why is Marvel Zombies not just a 2 -hour film?
The mini-series is divided into 4 episodes of 30 minutes. But because of Spider-Man …
The animated series Marvel Zombies – Online since Wednesday, September 24 on Disney+ – lasts more or less 2 hours.
But it is divided into four 30 -minute episodes. And all because of Spider-Man! Indeed, the weaver makes a remarkable passage in history helping Kamala breaking the undead using his canvases capable of slicing heads with shovel. However, his presence turned upside down the initial plans of Marvel Studios.
Yes, originally, Bryan Andrews and Brad Winderbaum developed Marvel Zombies as a film. But the inclusion of the araign man has turned everything upside down. As Winderbaum explains in an interview with Who Let us Out:
“For Spider-Man, we have certain rights on the character, and Sony holds others. We have the right to use it in an animation program of half an hour, that’s why we were also able to launch your friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man. But that meant that we had to transform our great epic history into four chapters. In the end, I think it helped the narration.”
Clearly, the Sony studio, which has owned the rights of the weaver for decades, agreed to share them with Disney in the late 2010s to allow Spider-Man to the Marvel Universe, from Homecoming. Producer Brad Winderbaum thus reveals that Marvel has the right to use the character in other programs derived from the MCU, but on a sine qua non condition: it can only appear in an animation series. And not in a 50 -minute animated drama, but a fiction with episodes of 30 minutes maximum. This actually excludes the possibility of making a Spider-Man film dedicated to Disney Plus, and which thus prevented Marvel Zombies from being a feature film.
It should also be noted that Sony also collaborates with Amazon Studios to make Spider-Noir. This time, unlike Disney and Marvel, Amazon signed a specific deal to take over the hero in a live action version with long episodes (released in 2026 on the video premium).
