YOUR FRIENDLY NEIGHBORHOOD SPIDER-MAN Almost Included Another Surprising Marvel Character

Marvel’s Disney+ series Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man drops this week, and it is looking like it’s going to be a really fun watch.

The series follows Peter Parker and his journey to becoming Spider-Man in the MCU. The story is set in an alternate timeline, where the webslinger’s origin story features a mentorship by Norman Osborn (of Oscorp fame), the alter ego to bitter enemy Green Goblin, instead of Tony Stark.

The story takes place in a world where Peter never met Ned or MJ, and instead is friends with Nico Minoru, but another Marvel character was almost utilized in her place.

Showrunner Jeff Trammell recently sat down with ComicBook to reveal: “What can I say? There was another character that we considered. I don’t know if I can say.

“Well, I’ll say first that, yes, as we knew we were going to do something different. It was kind of like, for this story we want to tell, we need certain characters to fit these roles.

“And for me, I love Nico. I love Runaways. This is very much like an amalgamation of just characters I love that I would love to interact with Spider-Man.”

He went on: “So being able to pull [Nico] over, being able to pull Jeanne Foucault over, being able to bring Amadeous Cho — so many of these characters that have a rich history, but also, hopefully this opens them up for even more audiences to go become fans of those characters in the comics.

“In terms of who Peter’s classmate was almost going to be, we had a lot of conversation about, de-aging, Jessica Jones and using her in that spot.”

That also would have been fun. But it sounds like they went a safer route without having to tread around in the world of the Defenders, which seems sort of up in the air at Marvel right now. What they landed on seems like it will make for a fun show.

The voice cast for the series includes Hudson Thames (What If...?) as Peter Parker, Eugene Byrd (Spidey and His Amazing Friends, 8 Mile) as Lonnie Lincoln, Grace Song (Kidding) as Nico Minoru, Hugh Dancy (Hannibal) as Otto Octavius, Kari Wahlgren (FLCL, Rick and Morty) as Aunt May, and Zeno Robinson (My Hero Academia, Pokemon Master Journeys: The Series) as Harry Osborn.  It also includes Charlie Cox as Matt Murdock / Daredevil along with Paul F. Tompkins as Bentley Wittman / Wizard.

The first two episodes of Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man are available now on Disney+.