Marvel's "What If...?" (Episode 5)

Episode 5: “What if Zombies?”

Q: What if the Marvel superheroes turned into zombies?

A: Hm. Okay, go on.

Q: Um. That’s it. That’s the idea. Zombies.

A: Yes. And?

Q: Well … they’re zombies. So they fight.

A: Look, superheroes fighting other superheroes is 90% of superhero movies. We already had a whole “Civil War” that was all about that.

Q: Yeah but they’re zombies now, so we can bisect them and cut their heads off and make them explode from the inside out.

A: Pure spectacle.

Q: Not sure quite what you expected when we crossed the two most stereotyped movie genres imaginable. Every superhero movie is more or less the same. Every zombie movie, ditto. So we get superheroes doing stereotypically zombie movie things in between punching each other.

A:  And Peter Parker making a jaunty, jokey “How to Survive the Zombie Apocalypse” video after watching his aunt, his friends and his entire neighborhood die horrifically.

Q: Paul Ruud appears as a Futurama style head in a jar and makes dad jokes.

A: All that achieves is to remind me of the better shows and movies he is referencing, but whatever.

Q: Did I mention one of the zombies explodes from the inside out?

A: Yeah, then they had a sad scene where the surviving heroes comfort one another about having the courage to go on living, which is a wonderful thing to have Chadwick Boseman’s voice tell you, but again Marvel really seems at a loss as to how to create a consistent tone. If it’s a jokey zombie slapstick, maybe stick with that instead of trying to do tragedy every third scene.

Q: Happy makes “pyew pyew” noises.

A: He does indeed, right before he gets murdered and turned into a zombie. See?

Q: What if we ended on a cliffhanger?

A: I don’t think that really works either. The fun of these things is to showcase all kinds of crazy or offbeat versions of the existing franchise, not establish some kind of ongoing storyline. I’m not really dying to know what happens next. Once you’ve introduced the idea of zombie superheroes, that’s it. 

There’s nothing more to explore here.