Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man: Release date, trailer, and status in the MCU Timeline

Tilt your head to the sky, all you true believers out there: Marvel Studios rang in the new year with the first trailer for Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man, a new animated series set to put a new spin on Peter Parker’s rise to heroism.

Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man has already crossed many boxes off the standard “Spider-Man origin story” checklist: a do-it-yourself superhero suit, high school drama, and a variation of Spidey’s age-old mantra about power and responsibility. However, the series’ teaser made it clear as day that this retelling of the Wall Crawler’s early days is taking big swings and changing some things around.

Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man shows off Spidey’s new friends, enemies, and paint job

Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man‘s teaser follows Peter (Hudson Thames) as he runs through a truncated version of his typical day: waking up late for school, chatting it up with his friends Nico Minoru and Pearl Pangan, and sneaking out of class to suit up and swing around New York beating up/webbing up bad guys.

Right until the end of the trailer, things look like standard high-school-era Spider-Man fair, with a few fun twists like Peter being friends with Lonnie Lincoln (Eugene Bryd), who comic book fans probably know better as the albino hitman-turned-crime boss Tombstone. Then, we see the Oscorp logo and discover that Norman Osborn (Coleman Domingo) will fill the role of Spider-Man’s mentor/tech provider.

Osborn, as his supervillain alter-ego Green Goblin, is one of Spider-Man’s most persistent and dangerous foes, and his ominous promise that he’ll help Peter “achieve greatness” reeks of ominous foreshadowing. The Spider-Man I grew up reading about in comics never had or needed a mentor who wasn’t Uncle Ben, but I’m curious to see where Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man goes with Peter and Norman’s new dynamic.

The other standout element of Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man’s teaser is the animation. The series’ art style is a blunt salute to the glossy, lithographic look of the original 1960s Spider-Man comics, but fans seem torn about it. Some users on Reddit posts like this one are comparing the animation to PlayStation 2-era graphics, but other people seem to appreciate its efforts to replicate the comics.

Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man isn’t part of the MCU’s Sacred Timeline

If you’re even a little bit familiar with the MCU’s incarnation of Spider-Man, Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man’s trailer was probably confusing. While the MCU never dived into Peter Parker’s earliest days as a costumed hero, it established Robert Downey Jr.’s Tony Stark as his mentor.

As it often does in comics and the movies and television they inspire, the answer lies in the multiverse. Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man isn’t part of the MCU’s “Sacred Timeline.” Instead, it’s set in an alternate one where things play out differently than in the movies we all flocked to theaters to see.

In a recent interview with Phase Hero, Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man‘s executive producer, Brad Widerdaum, explained that the series was originally going to play out on the Sacred Timeline, but the series creative team felt trying to squeeze the series into the MCU’s established canon put too many limitations on the characters they could use and the ideas they could explore.

While I’m sure some MCU Spider-Man fans feel a little betrayed, I’m excited to see what Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man does with its expanded creative freedom. The series is dropping on Disney+ on January 29th, 2025, so I won’t have to wait long to find out where the web-slinger’s newest adventure takes him.