Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man has premiered, and it released with a suspicious 100% Rotten Tomatoes score after actor Hudson Thames declared the Disney+ show to not be woke, despite it featuring a mostly race-swapped supporting cast for Peter Parker.
Rotten Tomatoes has a reputation for compiling critic scores that do Disney’s bidding, famously inflating opinions on the site to make it seem like the current Marvel and Star Wars slop is somehow brilliant. In 2024, Star Wars: The Acolyte famously ended with a 78% critic score, while audiences had the show at just 19%.
The initial score for Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man from access media critics came in at 100%, while the audience score currently shows a 76% rating.
Marvel fans criticized Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man upon its initial trailer release, mainly taking note of how all of the supporting cast had been changed to be BIPOC, most notably Norman and Harry Osborn, with the latter getting a design to look suspiciously transgender in nature.
Other characters are also replaced by diversity counterparts. There is no Gwen Stacy or Mary Jane Watson in the show, instead having the characters replaced by a queer-looking Asian girl named Nico Minoru and a large, brutish black woman who’s supposed to be Peter’s childhood crush named Pearl Pangan.
Flash Thompson, the high school bully from the original comics, is also notably missing. He’s been replaced by football star Lonnie Lincoln, a tall, strong, dashing black man who is notably the alter ego of the villain Tombstone in the comics. Except with this twist, since he’s black, he is presented not only as a superstar football jock but as a complete genius who’s a nice guy too.
Also notably different is Aunt May looks like a young Bruce Jenner, and it’s implied that Uncle Ben is dead from the start rather than having anything to do with the Spider-Man mythos, throwing “with great power comes great responsibility” out the window.
The show opens its first episode with another reimagining of the Spider-Man origin story. Peter gets invited to Midtown High, which is a school for super geniuses with a focus on robotics, and in a strange multi-dimensional portal opening with Doctor Strange, a small spider bites him. It flashes forward to months later with Peter at the high school.
He frets over his crush, Pearl, with Nico, who alerts him to the fact that Peter lost out to the football jock. He then becomes a study partner and friends with Lincoln. During this, Peter stops low-tier robbers using web devices he made with a homemade costume in a little break from the high school melodrama. The focus, however, is far more on the diverse side cast than on Peter during a lot of these segments, making for a woke, boring outing.
Lonnie Lincoln gets multiple solo scenes that dominate the back half of the first episode, where it’s clear people are racist and prejudiced against him. He looks forlorn as a grandma has a little white boy not sit next to him on the subway. Then a cop harasses him while he’s walking on the street just because he’s black, with generic hip-hop beats playing in the background to emphasize the plight.
While Lonnie gets a fully fleshed-out background showing a complete family, we get nothing of Peter Parker’s home life, showing the focus is on the diversity counterparts, and the show isn’t about the Spider-Man hero at all.
Meanwhile, Spider-Man arrests a white woman who’s robbing a very nice black man’s Pizza storefront in a disjointed mess of a story. Spider-Man convinces the store owner to be nice and let the white woman go because she’s down on her luck.
At the end of the first episode, we get introduced to black Norman Osborn, who arrives at Peter’s apartment and offers his hand in what’s supposed to be a hook for episode 2.
It’s clear the show is a woke change of Spider-Man aimed at modern audiences, something the critics will hail as they try to maintain their Disney access, but as more people watch this, they’ll clearly be offended by what was done with the beloved Marvel character.
What do you think about Disney shills in the media giving Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man a 100% Rotten Tomatoes score? Leave a comment and let us know.
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