With Smallville: The Complete Series arriving on Blu-ray tomorrow for the first time ever to celebrate its 20th Anniversary, I recently had the chance to speak with Tom Welling, Kristin Kreuk, and Michael Rosenbaum about the making of the show. During the very fun interview, they shared some very honest behind-the-scenes stories about what it really takes to make a show like Smallville, how they were always in the dark about getting another season, how they’ve stayed friends, their thoughts on how long the series could last, why Welling never made it to San Diego Comic-Con until the last year, how every episode someone ended up in the hospital, being happy social media didn’t exist back then, and more. In addition, we talked about how Smallville helped usher in the popularity of superhero properties and what’s going on with the Smallville animated series that Welling and Rosenbaum are trying to put together.
However, before getting to the interview, I wanted to look back for a second.
While superheroes on television and in the movies are commonplace now, with almost every network, streamer, and studio offering some version for their audiences, twenty years ago it was a different world. When Smallville first started, Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman has only gone off the air a few years prior, and The Tick with Patrick Warburton as the title character was about to also start airing on Fox. In addition, the first X-Men movie had only come out the year before, and Sam Raimi’s first Spider-Man movie was still a year away. Hollywood hadn’t yet figured out how much money could be made by adapting comic books and leaning into the superhero genre.
So when writer-producers Alfred Gough and Miles Millar pitched their take on Clark Kent and Superman to The WB (the original network that aired Smallville before it merged with UPN to form The CW), its success was far from guaranteed. In fact, if you study the numbers, the percentage chance of a script getting a pilot and then picked up to series is not great. And the chance of that series lasting more than one season is even lower and getting to a tenth season…that is a very rare occurrence.
But when the Smallville pilot set a ratings record with 8.4 million people tuning it to see this new take on Clark Kent, everyone noticed and the success of the series led to series-related merchandise, young-adult novels, new comic books, and more. It also showed the other networks and studios that people were interested in superhero stories, and the following years led to countless movies and series (some better than others) until some movie named Iron Man hit in 2008 and we all know what happened after that.
And while I’m not saying the success of Smallville caused everything that happened after they started airing, I do believe Smallville’s popularity allowed many executives to take a chance on superhero movies and series when in the past they might have said no.
Everything in Hollywood is interconnected. That’s why when a film about (insert any subject you want) is a bit hit over the weekend, the following Monday executives will tell people get me the next script like (whatever was popular that weekend). When executives see something is popular they feel safe making a bet. The success of Smallville absolutely led to more superhero properties and no matter what you think of Smallville, everyone who worked on that series deserves a thank you for helping to usher in this new age of superheroes in movies and on TV.
#Smallville #TomWelling #KristinKreuk #MichaelRosenbaum
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