On Sept. 24, Disney+ began streaming all four installments of its “Marvel Zombies” animated miniseries, and at the risk of over-reading, I think it tells us a lot about the current state of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, or MCU, as a whole.

To start with, I enjoyed “Marvel Zombies,” but I also recognize that it was specifically made for viewers like me.

“Marvel Zombies” is a sequel to an episode of the Disney+ animated series “What If…?”, which was essentially an anthology series exploring various alternate universes of the “main” MCU, which is also known as the 616 Marvel Universe, for highly comic book-specific reasons that my editor would simply remove if I included them anyway.

So this is already not targeted toward entry-level or casual MCU fans, who might wonder why Scott Lang’s disembodied head-in-a-jar is flying around on Doctor Strange’s cape-like red cloak.

The part that should be easy for just about anyone to grasp is that “Marvel Zombies” is set in an alternate universe where the Earth inhabited by Marvel’s superheroes has been overrun by a zombie plague.

In isolation, this premise isn’t really indicative of any larger trends, since zombie apocalypses have been popular in mainstream media for quite a while now.

Past versus future

But taken in combination with just about every MCU movie and TV show released since 2019’s “Avengers: Endgame,” it hammers home the theme that the best and most epic days of the MCU are well behind it.

Even this year’s well-made “Thunderbolts*” and “The Fantastic Four: First Steps” films represent an epilogue to and a retreat from the MCU, respectively, because the Thunderbolts are explicitly cast as falling short of the Avengers’ legacy, while the Fantastic Four are the first family of a completely new universe, that’s only tangentially connected to the MCU we’ve followed so far.

Like the 616 MCU, the universe of “Marvel Zombies” is inhabited by the diminished ranks of survivors left behind by previous waves of cullings — Tony Stark and Steve Rogers aren’t even around as shambling reanimated corpses anymore — so the starring characters of this miniseries are likely who you can expect to see as the MCU’s main players from now on.

A lot of folks talk a lot of smack about how far the once-mighty Mouse has fallen, but what’s striking is how many of the characters in this miniseries are voiced in animation by their original live-action actors.

Yes, sound-alike voice actors fill in for Chris Hemsworth as Thor and Tom Holland as Peter Parker, but Paul Rudd, Tessa Thompson and Academy Award-winner F. Murray Abraham all took time to reprise their roles, even though Scott Lang, Valkyrie and Khonshu’s appearances are glorified cameos at most.

Who to watch

Based on their prominence in “Marvel Zombies,” we should expect to see more live-action appearances by Wyatt Russell’s John Walker, David Harbour’s Red Guardian, Florence Pugh’s Yelena Belova and Simu Liu’s Shang-Chi (and Awkwafina as his friend Katy, apparently).

But the clear superstars of the MCU going forward will be Elizabeth Olsen’s Scarlet Witch and Iman Vellani’s Kamala Khan, with Dominique Thorne’s Riri Williams and Hailee Steinfeld’s Kate Bishop appearing just prominently enough to remind us of their status as legacy Avengers.

I’ve been saying for years that Kamala Khan, a.k.a. Ms. Marvel, is the truest successor to both Spider-Man and Captain America, and “Marvel Zombies” validates this status by turning her character into the flag, and the beacon of hope, around whom all the other heroes can rally.

Likewise, while Wanda Maximoff has spent years flailing about for a consistent role, within both the MCU and the comic books on which those movies and TV shows are based, Olsen has really excelled at playing the Scarlet Witch as a simultaneously sympathetic and existentially terrifying adversary for everyone else.

Just as Vellani’s performances capture Kamala’s indefatiguable optimism and compassion for others, so too is Olsen unsettlingly effective at radiating Wanda’s anguished depression and aggrieved vengeance.

Like Batman’s order versus the Joker’s chaos, or Captain America’s championing of liberty versus the Red Skull’s fascist oppression, Kamala versus Wanda could evolve into a primal dichotomy of archetypes, of healing empathy versus traumatized despair, and I wish I was confident that Disney is capable of recognizing and taking advantage of this potentially electric dynamic.

So, yes, “Marvel Zombies” is very much a microcosm of the post-”Endgame” MCU, in that it sets loose a reasonably interesting collection of remainder characters, without throwing them the lifeline of a narrative thread that has a future they can work toward, or even look forward to.