Last summer, Tom Welling let it slip in a Cameo video that he and Michael Rosenbaum were “working on an animated series to bring [their Smallville] characters back to life and use as many of the original cast members as possible.” (Welling was Clark Kent; Rosenbaum was Lex Luthor, but please tell me you knew that already.) It wasn’t entirely clear how serious or how deep into the process things were, and that was the last we heard about it in 2021.

Welling just gave the first major update on the show in a while at Fan Expo Vancouver (via ScreenRant) and it sounds like the project is pretty serious and stands a good chance of happening. On a panel with Smallville co-star Erica Durance, he gave these comments about the potential series:

We’re working on animated series that picks up right after our Smallville and, again, telling our own story and our vision is that we get Erica… It might be tough to get Allison ... But even Sam Jones III [who played Pete Ross] and Lionel Luthor is going to be a big part of that. John Glover wants to do it, we’ve already been into this. We’ve already gotten animation, we just don’t have the stories yet because Al and Miles are busy doing Tim Burton-like movies. As soon as they are done with that, we’re going to do this.

“Al and Miles” are Alfred Gough and Miles Millar, who developed Smallville for television and wrote and produced much of the series. The Tim Burton project Welling refers to is Wednesday, Netflix’s new TV series of The Addams Family. Gough and Millar created the show; Burton directed the pilot.

The nice part about an animated follow-up is it doesn’t matter whether Gough and Miller work on Wednesday for one year or ten years before they write this Smallville series. It’s already been more than 10 years since Smallville went off the air, but in animation you can pick up right where you left off and as long as the voices sound basically the same and no one will notice.

You can watch Welling and Erica Durance’s full panel at Fan Expo Vancouver below:

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