- One of Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man's producers has revealed why it has a "unique" release schedule
- Brad Winderbaum says it's because there's "a lot of Marvel content in 2025"
- He's denied that Daredevil: Born Again's forthcoming release is to blame for YFNSM's compressed release format
Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man's "unique" release schedule isn't a byproduct of Daredevil: Born Again's forthcoming launch, one of its executive producers has said.
Brad Winderbaum, who's also a producer on Daredevil's upcoming standalone series, told TechRadar that the latter isn't to blame for its sibling series' compressed release date format. Instead, Marvel's head of TV and streaming revealed that Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man's (YFNSM) is simply down to the company's ongoing "experimentation of how episodic shows are released".
Ever since WandaVision, the first Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) show, debuted on Disney Plus, the comic book giant has trialled new ways of delivering its small-screen content to fans. So far, it's tested launching new shows with one-episode or two-episode premieres, and releasing new installments of series on a daily basis, which it did with What If...?'s second and third seasons.
YFNSM's release schedule is another example of that experimentation. Confirmed on Instagram (see above), Spider-Man's latest animated series will arrive in four, multi-episode parts. The Marvel Phase 5 project's first two entries arrive on launch day (January 29), chapters three to five will debut one week later on February 5, episodes six and eight land on February 12, before the final two installments air on February 19.
With Daredevil: Born Again due out on one of the world's best streaming services just two weeks after YFNSM's first season ends, some fans have theorized that Marvel is pushing the latter out of the door early to make room for the highly-anticipated former's arrival. However, Winderbaum suggests that, while YFNSM's multi-episode schedule differs from the studio's traditional release format, this couldn't be further from the truth.
"I think that you can see with many streamers, including Disney Plus, there is a lot of experimentation going on with how episodic shows are released," he told me. "I'm a big fan of week over week. Part of that [reason] is that anticipation and the other is having to go through the week between [last episode's] cliff hanger to get the payoff. That's the TV show experience, so I like some sort of week over week cadence.
"But, there's a lot of Marvel content [being released] in 2025," he added. "We want to make sure that everything has room to stand on its own feet, so that was the reason to release it [YFNSM] over four weeks instead of ten. It's also a very unique show that has a high school soap opera element to it. You know, it's kind of our version of [Canadian high school series] Degrassi High in a lot of ways and there's a feeling of wanting to see that next step in the character journey, especially when you get into the into the latter two thirds of the of the season You really start to get used to those characters. You want to start seeing them interact and seeing those character setups pay off, so I'm excited for fans to get a different kind of viewing experience."
I'll be covering YFNSM in more detail throughout its first season. For now, find out why its showrunner has defended its divisive animation style in the wake of fierce fan criticism, or get the lowdown on everything we know about Daredevil's TV return by reading my Daredevil: Born Again guide.
