By One of Marvel Studios’ big animated series in 2025 is “Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man,” a show that will deal with how Peter Parker gained his abilities and worked as a vigilante.
Originally it seemed at though the project would serve as a prequel to Tom Holland’s work in the films, dealing with Peter in a home-made Spidersuit before we meet him in “Captain America: Civil War” and Tony Stark becomes his mentor.
Then it was later revealed the series was set in its own reality, away from the MCU, and would see him don multiple different kinds of costumes and take on various villains. At the same time Norman Osborn (voiced by Colman Domingo) would serve in the mentor role rather than Tony Stark.
Speaking with Phase Hero, Marvel Television boss Brad Winderbaum was asked about the decision not to set the animated series on the Earth-616 of the main MCU. He says creatively it was boxing them in too much:
“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.
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.”
Hudson Thames, Eugene Byrd, Grace Song, Zeno Robinson, Hugh Dancy and Charlie Cox also lend their voices to the project which has Jeff Trammell as head writer. The series premieres on Disney+ on January 29th.
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