The upcoming Marvel Zombies TV series will feature Ikaris from Eternals - a twist that makes the zombie virus even more disturbing. Eternals introduced a new cosmic group of superheroes into the MCU, but so far Marvel has seemed wary of integrating them into the wider MCU. Chloe Zhao's film may have included a third act in which a gigantic Celestial began to tear its way out of the Earth's core, but so far the Eternals mostly seem to have influenced the shared universe through Kingo's Bollywood career, name-dropped in Ms. Marvel.
Ironically, it now seems the first MCU project to include a cameo from one of the Eternals will be Marvel Zombies, now set for 2024 with a TV-MA rating. The Marvel Studios Animation panel at San Diego Comic-Con 2022 included confirmation of a vast cast list, with the still-alive heroes include Yelena, Kate Bishop, Agent Woo, Red Guardian, Death Dealer, Shang-Chi and Kamala Khan. In a surprising twist, Marvel also revealed at least one of the Eternals will become a zombie - Ikaris, played by Richard Madden in Eternals.
This is a surprising twist, because it means the zombie virus is even more infectious than had previously been thought to be the case. In the MCU, Eternals are synthetic beings rather than organic. The Celestials' previous creations, the Deviants, had gone rogue as a result of evolution, and the Celestials such as Arishem pivoted towards using synthetics precisely because they would not change. This is, therefore, a major moment in that the zombie virus has infected a whole new life form.
What Zombie Ikaris Means For The Zombie Virus
The zombie virus originated from the Quantum Realm, but it's reasonable to assume even there it naturally spread through entirely organic beings. The infection of an Eternal either means the virus is more durable than had previously seemed to be the case, or - even worse - that it is in fact evolving to infect other types of life-form. It's true the process the Celestials used to create the Eternals is still mysterious; they were certainly organic enough for their energy to be drained by the Deviant warlord Kro. Still, a successful Eternals infection could mean the virus is evolving towards a state where even fully synthetic beings such as Vision are no longer immune.
On the face of it, Marvel Zombies seems to be a direct continuation of the timeline seen in Marvel's What If...? episode 5, but the inclusion of Zombie Scarlet Witch is actually something of a problem. She was one of the zombies summoned by Supreme Strange to battle Ultron in episode 9, and she was apparently destroyed when Ultron obliterated an entire planet. Presumably, Supreme Strange's actions created what Marvel call a "nexus" where the timeline separates into multiple branches; the upcoming Disney+ TV-MA series is set in the branch where Strange didn't open a portal. Amusingly, this raises the possibility that Ultron created new branched timelines rather than destroying them - timelines where he never wreaked havoc at all. Perhaps Ultron wasn't as dangerous as the Watcher made viewers believe - but the zombie virus in Marvel Zombies is even worse.
