There's not going to be another 10 year saga. Feige already said they are only doing smaller arcs from now on. 5 years....maybe.
And Spider-Man was never going to be the face of the MCU going forward....they already announced every Phase 4 movie or TV series he wasn't even on the time line.
So nah, the plan was never to have him be that important to the MCU. It sucks they lost him but I'm sure in the back of their minds they probably entertained the thought that it would happen.
Fred.
Disney was pretty smart about it. Spider-man for all the mcu-poster-boy talk is not integral to anyone's movie nor necessary to mention even if he were still around. GotG 3, DS2, CM2, BP2, Thor 4, Blade, Eternals, Shang-Chi... all got their own characters to worry about and had minimal if any interaction with Parker. It was really only Ironman... who they planned to kill off anyway.. and that aligned perfectly with the Spidey contract.
Not to mention i dunno what poster boy means here. I mean, Ironman was the posterboy because of
box office. They saw audiences (1) went to RDJ's movie, (2) no-showed Evans movie, and (3) said Hemsworth's movie was trash... so RDJ was
the guy going forward.
Well of the future movies i listed, they got 4 movie franchises that do 800 million+, two of which did over a billion apiece. Disney can slap em all on a poster and only the internet will act like they're in trouble.