Here’s How ‘Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man’ Fits Into the MCU Canon

“Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man” brings another iteration of the iconic comic book web-slinger to the screen. Spidey’s been swinging through the Marvel Cinematic Universe for nearly a decade and now, nine years after he made his debut in “Captain America: Civil War,” audience are getting a new story set in that same time period. Kind of.

Thanks to shifting creative priorities at the studios and behind-the-scenes corporate deals, Spider-Man has always had one of the more complicated cinematic canons as an oft-rebooted franchise header who’s also one of the only Marvel Cinematic Universe characters owned by another studio. Then the multiverse hit the MCU and “Spider-Man: Far From Home” blew open the canon even further, putting Toby McGuire and Andrew Garfield’s Spider-Men in play right alongside current franchise star Tom Holland.

Now, “Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man” enters the fray after its own canon-confusing creative journey, so if you’re unsure where it fits, here’s everything you need to know.

Is “Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man” Set in the MCU?

Yes and no. It’s a part of the multiverse. It’s tied up in a lot of the same lore, it’s just set in a different timeline from the “Earth-616” timeline, aka, the events of the MCU before the multiverse opened up — and unleashed chaos on anyone trying to keep the timeline straight.

So, It’s Just Set in the Multiverse, Why Is That Confusing?

We’re all pretty used to the multiverse at this point so it’s not really, but the development process threw a little bit of confusion into the mix.

The series was originally announced in 2021 and briefly developed as “Spider-Man: Freshman Year,” which would tell Peter Parker’s story leading up to Tom Holland’s introduction as the character in “Captain America: Civil War.” Then it adjusted course and became an all-new spin on the iconic comic book character, including his origins.

“What’s funny is it was kind of only in the main timeline for the initial two months of development,” showrunner Jeff Trammell said in a interview with GamesRadar+, “and then it was like, ‘Oh, well, this kind of limits us; let’s go another route.’ So the first episode is essentially the first script I ever wrote for the show. Nothing really changed. So it’s not like, ‘Oh, this was this, and then we scrapped it, but we saved this scene,’ like it’s all from its pretty much inception Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man, and that has always kind of been the case.”

Why Did They Change the Plan and Why Isn’t It Canon to Earth-616?

Basically, staying within the established canon didn’t give them much creative room to work with.

Marvel TV boss Brad Winderbaum explained in an interview with Phase Hero, “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.”

Trammell echoed that in an interview with Animation Magazine, explaining, “I’m a huge fan of the MCU Spider-Man films, but if our show existed in the main MCU timeline, we would be severely limited in the types of stories we could tell and would have a pretty short shelf life.”

But It’s Still Supposed to Be Tom Holland’s Peter Parker, Right?

Yep, pretty much! In the same way that Hugh Jackman’s character in “Deadpool & Wolverine” was Wolverine but not quite the same Wolverine.

Similarly, thanks to “No Way Home” and the “Spider-Verse” series, we’ve met a whole lot of Spider-Folk. But the Peter Parker in “Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man” doesn’t just look and sound a lot like Tom Holland’s version of the character, he is essentially a different spin on that character (as played by Hudson Thames, who previously voiced Peter Parker in “What If?“).

“We always wanted the audience to know, this is the Peter you know from Homecoming,” Trammell told GamesRadar+, “but things are different. So I think leaning into that as much as we could of like, ‘Yep, you’ve seen this; you know how this goes, but do you? … that’s the throughline of the show: we are giving you these characters that you know, but we’re changing what you know about them to keep them fresh, keep you on your toes, and always kind of keep you guessing.”

You’ll notice certain beats echo each other (notice the shot framing and song choice when Peter meets Norman Osborne for the first time compared to when he met Tony Stark, for example), with plenty of MCU Easter Eggs, references and characters tied to the events of the films. However, the main storyline diverges in its own direction, creating a new iteration of that character.

When Is “Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man” Set?

The first season of the series kicks off around the events of “Captain America: Civil War,” which is of course, right about when Peter would have met Tony and teamed up with him in the big inter-Avengers battle. Instead, he meets Norman Osborn, in a “sister timeline” as Trammell describes it.

In this timeline, he attends Rockford T. Bales High School instead of Midtown and becomes close friends with Nico Minoru, Lonnie Lincoln and Harry Osborn, rather than Ned Leeds and MJ.

You’ll still see some familiar MCU events playing out in the background, but this Peter’s story is going its own way, spinning yet another line in the web of Spider-Man’s increasingly wild screen canon.

The post Here’s How ‘Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man’ Fits Into the MCU Canon appeared first on TheWrap.

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