Is Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man a part of the MCU? Details explored as new teaser drops

Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man is the upcoming animated series that follows Peter Parker balancing his life as the web-head and high school. One thing that separates Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man from other Spider-Man animated shows is its animation style, in which the characters look like they did in the 60s comics, but the world around them is the present.

When the show was announced back in November 2021, Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man was intended to be a prequel to Holland's Peter Parker. However, it looks like the makers changed their minds by setting the show in a different continuity over time. Brad Winderbaum, the Marvel executive recently revealed that Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man is not a part of the MCU. This was done so that they were free to tell stories their own way.

Throughout the ten episodes of the animated series, we will meet characters like Doctor Strange, Amadeus Cho, Norman and Harry Osborn, Curt Conners, and more importantly different versions of Wilson Fisk and Matt Murdock. Moreover, Murdock and Fisk will be voiced by Charlie Cox and Vincent D'Onofrio respectively.

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Brad Winderbaum explains why Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man is set in a different continuity

Winderbaum recently appeared in an interview with a Phase Hero podcast in which he justified the decision to set Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man in a different universe altogether. He said that tying the show to the MCU continuity prohibited the writing staff from exploring Peter Parker’s story and villains. He said:

"It started out as, 'Okay it's Spider-Man’s freshman year, he’s going to be a freshman, can we get away with this being entirely in the MCU?' and very early on in the development process, we realized how locked in that actually made us. We couldn't really use his rogues gallery, we couldn't really use his origin. It was not fun, honestly. We would've had to put so many limiters on our story to get it to lock into canon. Every single project I’ve worked on, they've all had a life of their own.... You have to let them live their own lives and go where they want to go."

However, Winderbaum promised Marvel fans that the show’s story will retain Holland’s Spider-Man movies' vibe and tone even if it is disconnected from the MCU. He said:

"It does have a lot of DNA that is very similar to the MCU depiction of the Tom Holland Spider-Man, but it really also draws all the way back to Steve Ditko. It's adjacent to the main continuity but really speaks to what is inherent about the character."

The inclusion of characters like Harry Osborn, Amadeus Cho, Speed Demon, Venom, Otto Octavius, Curt Connors, and White Rabbit has Spider-Man fans excited. Setting this series in a different universe makes sense because it would break the MCU lore.

Spider-Man: No Way Home was the first time that we saw Peter meeting Norman Osborne, Otto Octavius, and Curt Connors. The canonicity of Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man was in question right when it was revealed that in the show, young Peter will be mentored by Norman Osborne rather than Tony Stark. This storyline would've not made sense if the show was tied to the MCU.

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What is the new animated Spider-Man show about?

As stated before, the animated show takes Peter back to high school. The first footage for the show was shown in D-23 back in August 2024. It revealed a key change to Peter's origin tale. In the show, it is revealed that the Spider that bit Peter Parker is from a different dimension and Doctor Strange is somehow involved in it. However, this is not the only major change.

In this show, Norman Osborne, usually Peter's nemesis Green Goblin offers to be his mentor and assist his activities as the wall-crawler, meaning he knows Spider-Man's identity. It is also possible that Norman wants to mentor Peter for nefarious reasons. The synopsis for the show reads:

"'Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man' follows Peter Parker on his way to becoming a hero, with a journey unlike we've ever seen and a style that celebrates the character’s early comic book roots."

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Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man will begin streaming on Disney+ across the world from January 29, 2025. Recently the unique release schedule for the show was also revealed. We learned that the first two episodes will stream on January 29, episodes 3, 4, and 5 on February 5, and episodes 6, 7, and 8 on February 12. Finally, the last two episodes will be released on February 19, 2025.

It is believed that this release schedule was chosen so that the animated show doesn't overlap with Daredevil: Born Again. But that isn't confirmed officially yet.