Marvel Just Confirmed the Next Green Goblin—and It Could Shake Up the MCU
The MCU may be bursting with heroes, but it still has a web-shaped hole. Sony Pictures’ grip on Spider-Man has made Marvel’s marquee hero its trickiest crossover — and kept parts of Peter Parker’s world conspicuously out of the mix.
Spider- Man and the MCU have always been a weird dance. Peter Parker can show up and crack jokes with the Avengers, but a lot of his world lives over at Sony, which means the rest of his rogues and supporting cast come in on a delay (or not at all). For ages, there has really been one Green Goblin in live-action who mattered: Willem Dafoe, who owned Sam Raimi's 2002 Spider-Man and then got hauled back almost two decades later for Spider-Man: No Way Home. Now, Marvel is setting up a different Green Goblin — in animation — and he is coming. Just not yet.
The show: a different MCU, a different mentor
Marvel's animated series Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man is set in an alternate MCU timeline where Peter Parker (voiced by Hudson Thames) does not get scooped up by Tony Stark. Instead, he ends up mentored by Norman Osborn (voiced by Colman Domingo ). That twist alone gives the show a fresh lane: Peter and Norman actually like each other, which makes the inevitable turn feel a lot more loaded.
Season 1 leaned into that tension. Norman stayed publicly helpful but privately slippery. His portal experiments accidentally unleashed a symbiote. A Doctor Strange time jumble looped Peter's origin back on itself: Norman secretly used Peter's blood in his spider experiments, and those irradiated test spiders are what turned Peter into Spider-Man in the first place. Translation: in this universe, Norman literally created his own friendly neighborhood problem.
Yes, this universe is getting its own Green Goblin
Marvel Studios executive producer Brad Winderbaum confirmed on The Escape Pod podcast that the series will eventually crown a new Green Goblin — Domingo's Norman — but the show is not rushing the transformation. It is playing the long game with multiple characters (he even called out Lonnie Lincoln's slow roll toward becoming Tombstone) so the heel turns actually hurt when they land.
"Spoiler! He's going to become Green Goblin at some point, it's coming... you get to live with the characters first and learn about the relationships so that when those big cards get turned over, it has a huge emotional impact."
That approach is very old-school Spider-Man. The classic comics took their sweet time turning the Green Goblin from a question mark into a nightmare, then cashed it in with a reveal that Peter's best friend's dad was his worst enemy — and it all fed into the tragedy around Gwen Stacy. If this show is methodically building its own version of that arc, patience is the point.
Where things stand going into Season 2
- Peter Parker is Spider-Man in an alternate MCU branch; Norman Osborn is his mentor, not Tony Stark.
- Norman is still publicly a 'good guy' but he's been running secret experiments behind the scenes.
- Those experiments unleashed a symbiote and tied Peter's origin to Norman's lab via a Doctor Strange time loop.
- Norman currently has two terrifying ingredients on hand: irradiated spiders and a symbiote sample, plus his legit projects and an arsenal. That combo could make this Goblin the nastiest take yet when he finally goes full mask.
- Marvel is deliberately slow-cooking villain turns here (Norman, Tombstone, etc.) for maximum payoff.
- Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man Season 2 is slated to hit Disney+ in late 2026.
The bottom line
Willem Dafoe's Green Goblin will always be a high bar. But Marvel has set the table for Colman Domingo's Norman to become a very different kind of threat — one built on trust, mentorship, and a lot of bad science simmering under the surface. The mask is coming. The show just wants you to feel it when it drops.