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An Untold Tale: Steven DeKnight Discusses Smallville’s Justice League Spinoff

In previously-unpublished interview material, Steven DeKnight discusses a Smallville Justice League spinoff that never happened.

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Recently on Twitter, writer-producer Steven DeKnight (Marvel’s Daredevil, Spartacus) made a reference to a Justice League spinoff from Smallville that almost happened a decade ago. The series would have been led by Justin Hartley as Green Arrow/Oliver Queen — five years before Stephen Amell took on the hood — and characters including Bart Allen, Cyborg, and Aquaman, all from the Smallville episode “Justice” which DeKnight wrote and directed, were to be a part of it.

Smallville Justice“Justice” was one of the highest-rated episodes of Smallville and was also one of the highest-rated TV episodes in The CW’s ten-year history.

Nine years ago, in doing interviews for the Smallville: The Official Companion book for Season 6, this writer spoke with DeKnight about the “Justice” episode, and while the book itself has a lot of quotes related to what we saw on the screen, a lot of the talk about the Justice League spinoff was excised. As those quotes were not published, we are sharing them here for the first time.

“There were a couple of different plans that never quite came to fruition,” DeKnight revealed during the interview for the book. “At one point we were planning a spin-off; we were starting to put it together.”

“It was going to be basically Green Arrow, Cyborg, Flash, a couple of other DC characters living in Metropolis,” DeKnight recalled. “The idea was that Oliver Queen was basically giving refuge to young people with superpowers, kind of in a Professor X kind of way, putting together this team and also trying to help out these people, like he says in ‘Justice’ about how he helped out Victor Stone and Bart and Arthur Curry.”

manyfacesjla2The Justice League spinoff would have been teed up in Smallville’s Season 6 finale. “The idea with that was that Green Arrow was going to appear towards the end and help Clark with his final battle, provide him with an important piece of information. As it was in the season, we actually find out that Green Arrow and his crew of superheroes have been attacking the 33.1 installations. In ‘Prototype’ they provide the information on how to penetrate the prototype’s forcefield. But originally he was going to come back and help out, and that was going to springboard the spin-off that, ultimately, just never happened,” he said.

Sadly, it was not meant to be. “I was supposed to co-create it and run it, so I’m doubly sad. We were all really excited about it, you know, me and the other actors. We all got along great. We really wanted to make this show, and we thought it would be really, really cool,” DeKnight lamented.

sv6companionWhat might we have seen in a Justice League spinoff? We don’t know, but one plan might have included Brainiac — even possibly in a different form, played by a different actor if James Marsters had been busy. “We had talked about bringing Brainiac back, quite possibly in a different form, played by a different actor. We’d kicked around some ideas for bringing him back as somebody else from the Buffyverse, which would’ve been a fun nod. We talked about bringing him back as a woman. And I wouldn’t be surprised at some point between now and the time the show wraps up that Brainiac pops back up,” he said, predicting something that ultimately did not happen. DeKnight revealed that he did have a master plan for Brainiac in the spinoff. “I had a master plan for Brainiac showing up in the spin-off that I won’t tell you what it is, because you never know, a spin-off may happen in the future, and I will use this. But it was awesome,” he said.

Smallville: The Official Companion Season 6 is still available on Amazon.com – order a copy and show the publisher there’s still demand, because this writer would still enjoy finishing the series someday, and there are more stories like this one within! And if you’d like more Smallville Untold Tales, please let us know!

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3 Comments

3 Comments

  1. Lu Reindeer

    September 1, 2016 at 6:30 am

    Hell yes I like Smallville I always did, I’ve seen the entire show twice and all do it again and again I never get tired of watching it. I guess is because I grew up with the show best show ever.

  2. Forry

    September 7, 2016 at 1:42 pm

    I hadn’t really watched Smallville until this past month. As a fan of Amell’s Arrow I actually started watching Smallville from Green Arrow’s first appearance to see if I dug it. I was almost instantly reminded of why Superman was my favorite hero. I loved the characters, it would have been great to see a Justice League show, but I don’t if it was exactly the right time. I do wish though that the current DCETVU hadn’t forsaken those 10 years of world building to basically use the same formulas and heroes without any of the familiar faces. I understand Hartley & Amell would have created continuity issues, but I would have gotten over it to finally see my era’s Clark Kent in full Superman regalia even once.

    • Forry

      September 7, 2016 at 1:43 pm

      Oh yeah, BTW, now I’m starting smallville from the beginning so it’s like I’m getting a backstory to the backstory. cool way to enjoy the show.

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Smallville

Smallville 25th Anniversary Convention: All Weekend Passes Now Available

The Salute to Smallville 25th Anniversary Convention in Nashville has made all weekend admission pass tiers available.

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We are as excited as everyone else around here for Creation Entertainment’s Salute to Smallville convention in November as it will be celebrating the 25th anniversary of the show! KryptonSite’s Craig Byrne (that’s me!) is back to co-emcee the event with good friend and fellow enthusiast Derek Russell from The House of El. Guests for the show include Tom Welling, Michael Rosenbaum, Kristin Kreuk, Erica Durance, Laura Vandervoort, John Glover, Sam Jones III, Helen Slater, Eric Johnson, Erica Cerra, Adrianne Palicki, and Phil Morris, with hopefully more to be announced!

Before today, only the highest-tier (and most expensive) Gold admission passes had been available for the November 6-7 event which will be happening in Nashville, Tennessee… but now, Silver, Copper, and very affordable General Admission passes are now being offered, making it a great time to hop on and plan a trip for later this year!

Salute to Smallville will feature Q&A panels with cast, autograph and photo opportunities, meet and greets, and much more…. and it’s a great opportunity to meet other people who loved and enjoyed Smallville as much as you have! For many of us, we’ve been watching for a quarter of a century!

Check it out – let’s get this event sold out!

 

DISCLAIMER: When he’s not working on websites for himself, Craig Byrne works on graphics and websites for Creation Entertainment, and as mentioned before, he is also one of the hosts of this event!

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April Fools

[APRIL FOOL’S 2026] The CW To Air Smallville 25th Anniversary Special (Exclusive)

The CW will be returning to the superhero game with a 25th anniversary special devoted to Smallville.

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NOTE: This is an April Fool’s Day post and the elements mentioned within are all a work of fiction… as far as we know.

The CW will be paying homage to one of its classics at a time when their current direction has been going far, far away.

The network, which was home to Smallville as well as such fan-favorite shows as Supernatural, The Vampire Diaries, The Flash, Arrow and more, has mostly gone the way of acquired TV from other countries, reality TV, and sports since the Nexstar organization took control of The CW and reduced owners CBS (now Paramount) and Warner Bros. (soon to be part of Paramount themselves) to being minority share-holders… but that looks to change. Exercising their right to dictate at least part of the programming, and perhaps a precursor of things to come from The CW once the Paramount/WB merger happens, The CW has scheduled a Smallville 25th Anniversary TV special to air in June, five months before the actual anniversary which will hit in October.

The special will feature interviews with series stars Tom Welling, Kristin Kreuk, Michael Rosenbaum, Erica Durance, John Glover, Annette O’Toole, Laura Vandervoort, Cassidy Freeman and Justin Hartley and it will be hosted by Supernatural actor and Entertainment Tonight correspondent Matt Cohen. Creators Alfred Gough and Miles Millar are also a part of the special, which will additionally include archival interviews and footage from the time of the series’ original run. The “SV25” logo created by Derek Russell for The House of El has been licensed by the special’s producers to be seen in the special. Fans including the author of this article were also interviewed for the feature, with interviews having been conducted at one of last year’s conventions. Never-before-seen deleted scenes from episodes of Smallville – ones that aren’t even on the DVD box sets – are expected to be unearthed.

If that’s not enough, the Smallville 25th Anniversary Special is rumored to have footage from the top-secret Smallville: Wall of Weird (working title) pilot episode that was shot last November for a streaming service. While it appears the project was completely buried in the wake of the Paramount/WB merger, we are told that the first episode was a hybrid of a reboot and a sequel, featuring Tom Welling, Michael Rosenbaum, and Erica Durance in supporting roles with appearances by Kristin Kreuk and, for some reason, Eric Johnson, and that it was best described as “Smallville meets Stranger Things,” with a young cast investigating the strange occurrences in Smallville in the decades after its two meteor showers. Unfortunately, this might be the only footage we ever see from the series because of the previously-mentioned merger; additionally, there apparently are some legal/rights issues involved as well as a hesitation to have yet another take of Superman in live-action media while James Gunn has his movie franchise. Also, in a world where even Hulu has passed on new Buffy and Starfleet Academy is gone after only two seasons, it seems the studios and streamers are just afraid to take that risk. Take a look at some photos from the Smallville: Wall of Weird pilot shoot here, leaked by director James Beeman himself!

Currently, The Smallville 25th Anniversary Special: Always Hold On To Smallville is scheduled to air Friday, June 19. If it does well, perhaps we’ll learn more about some of these other projects. What do you think? Leave some comments below, come talk about this on the KryptonSite Forum, and be sure to read this link before you share this big news.

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Smallville

Justin Hartley Would “Love” To Play Green Arrow Again

When asked if he’d play a superhero, Justin Hartley says he would love to play the Green Arrow again.

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Justin Hartley

Appearing yesterday on The Jennifer Hudson Show to promote his show Tracker, Justin Hartley was asked by Hudson if he’d ever like to play a superhero again… and his response might be surprising and of course welcomed by the Smallville fandom.

“I would love to play a superhero again,” he told her, continuing on to say which superhero he’d like to play.

“You know, there are so many interesting ones that have been portrayed and there are so many that haven’t yet been portrayed… what I think would be really cool, though, now that I’m older [and] I have different life experiences, I would approach it differently and it would be a different story… I’d like to jump back into that Green Arrow suit, honestly.”

He did have one caveat: “Maybe not that exact suit, but something a bit hipper.”

“I think you’d find him in a different place, and you could tell different stories,” Hartley said about Green Arrow and his alter ego. “He’s been through stuff, and I think it would be interesting. I would love that.”

Years before Stephen Amell donned the green tights, Justin Hartley played Oliver Queen, the Green Arrow in five seasons of Smallville. Of course, if he were to ever return, we assume his character would be a widower. Al & Miles, are you listening?

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