Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man Is No Longer Canon

Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man was initially expected to arrive this year. However, the release date has been pushed back and part of the reason is probably the creative team changing their minds about its narrative.

Marvel announced Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man in 2021. It has been three years of waiting and the animated series is still not ready for release. There were rumors that it could stream on Disney this year, but sources claimed in October that there was a delay in the production and it would not premiere until 2025. Marvel TV head Brad Winderbaum spoke about the anticipated animated series, and the new information he shared could be among the reasons why fans had to wait longer for the series.

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According to Winderbaum, they will not pursue the initial plan to make the show canon because it’s limiting their creativity. He explained that forcing it to be canon put the creative team in a “hard place” in terms of development. “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,” he told Phase Hero. “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.”

Winderbaum and the creative team considered MCU’s live-action movie starring Tom Holland as Peter Parker. However, while they reflected on the timeline, they realized that it was challenging to fit the project they were working on into the already-established Spider-Man franchise. “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,” he explained, suggesting that their Peter Parker version would be somewhat different from what fans saw on the big screen. However, he also clarified that the series would not be disparate. It will still contain the essential elements of a Spider-Man story. “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,” he explained. “It’s adjacent to the main continuity but really speaks to what is inheritant about the character.”

It’s understandable why the creative team behind Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man wanted to make it canon. Doing so will tie the show to the bigger Spider-Man titles, especially the MCU films, which are massive hits. A cohesive and interconnected universe is also great for a superhero story like Spider-Man, who is not an isolated character. However, making a canon project from an established universe or franchise is also challenging because the creative team has to align their write-ups with a larger body of work. They need to ensure that their project is aligned with the established timeline, events, characters and rules of the universe. They have to track the lore and connections of the previous Spider-Man projects, be it movies or series. It’s hard work and it’s clear that the people working on Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man no longer want to push themselves into doing that and that’s okay. It made sense, especially since fans were already expecting the show. Not making the animated series canon is okay, so long as it delivers.

Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man is expected to be released in 2025.

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Source: Phase Hero