Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man Will Remind You of a Robert Downey Jr.-Tom Holland Scene From MCU

Spider-Man is undoubtedly one of the most featured Marvel superheroes on screen, be it in the form of animations or live action. Now, the studio is bringing another adaptation of the Webslinger through their Disney+ show Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man.

As far as the MCU is concerned, Tom Holland has been playing the live-action version of Spider-Man, and his superhero journey began under Robert Downey Jr.’s Tony Stark’s mentorship. Now, the new Spider-Man show seems to remind fans of those times with one of the very first scenes of their interaction.

Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man recalls Robert Downey Jr. and Tom Holland’s first interaction from Civil War

Tom Holland has been playing Peter Parker/Spider-Man in the Marvel Cinematic Universe for about eight years now since he was recruited by Robert Downey Jr.’s Tony Stark in Captain America: Civil War to fight from his side.

Since then, Spider-Man’s story has evolved throughout his own trilogy. However, it all started under Tony Stark’s mentorship, as it was he who fueled the motivation to become more than just a friendly neighborhood hero in Parker and also provided him the technology to upgrade his suit.

But the upcoming show Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man will feature Norman Osborn instead of Tony Stark as Parker’s mentor, and the story will take place in an alternate timeline showing the origin story of the Webslinger. However, the first trailer of the show features a scene that reminds fans of the first interaction between Stark and Parker that took place in Civil War.

In the trailer, Spider-Man is shown stopping an uncontrolled speeding car from hitting a bus with his bare hands. This exact scene was shown in Civil War when Stark shows Parker a footage of him stopping the car while persuading him to confess his identity.

This is not the first time, since the animated sequences are inspired by live-action versions. Earlier, a similar case was observed when The Spectacular Spider-Man series featured multiple scenes from Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man movies.

Such connections definitely bring a lot more excitement to the viewers as they create a sense of a shared multiverse. Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man will feature Hudson Thames as Peter Parker, and some other important characters include Norman and Harry Osborn, Otto Octavius, Daredevil, Aunt May, among others.

Is Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man canon to the MCU?

With such noticeable similarities, questions about the canon status of the upcoming show arise. However, Marvel Studios’ head of streaming, TV, and animation, Brad Winderbaum, recently revealed in his interview on Phase Zero that the show is not canon to the MCU. Talking about the reasons, he said,

Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man started as Spider-Man: Freshman Year. He’s going to be a freshman, can we get away with it being entirely in the MCU and very early on in the development process we realized how locked in that actually made us. Like we couldn’t really use his rouges gallery or this aspect of 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 so quickly that we were like, ‘Throw the doors off this place, blow it up.’ What do we want to do, what is Spider-Man about? Through Jeff’s vision it does have a lot of the DNA that is similar to the MCU’s depiction of the Tom Holland Spider-Man but it also draws all the way back to Steve Ditko and it tells a standalone story that like many comic books is adjacent to the main continuity but speaks to what is inherent about the character.

However, the story shares similarities to Tom Holland’s Spidey, such as the need for a mentor in the form of Norman Osborn. And it seems almost like an opposite alternate timeline, as in the scared timeline, there is no Oscorp and there are no Osborns, and in Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man, there is no Tony Stark.

Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man will premiere on Disney+ on January 29, 2025.