We’ve recently been through an era where there could concurrently be a Superman in multiple mediums at the same time; a world where there can be four different incarnations of Bruce Wayne at a time. Aside from Superman Returns coming out while Smallville was still on the air, that didn’t happen as much back in that time, which provided some limitations on what could or could not be done. Heck, before Smallville was in development for The WB, there was a Bruce Wayne TV series project in the works!
Speaking in a panel at the recent TerrifiCon convention, Tom Welling talked a bit about two things he would have liked to have seen on Smallville — and one of those things is Bruce Wayne.
“I always thought that we should have had Bruce Wayne pass through somehow,” Tom said during his panel Q&A. “That would have been really cool to see. Like, you know how Clark always got into the Luthor Mansion with no problem? [What if] he had gone into Lex’s office, and it was just as simple as Lex being like ‘good to meet you, Bruce,’ or ‘I’ll talk to you later, Bruce,’ and have him just walk out,” he added, making the someday-Superman and Batman just pass each other.
“I think that would have been cool, but one of the challenges we had is DC movies and DC television don’t talk to each other,” he continued, adding that even using the John Williams Superman score could be a challenge.
How close did Smallville actually get to landing Bruce Wayne? See what show creators Alfred Gough and Miles Millar had to say!
There’s another iconic moment in Superman lore that Tom would have liked to have done: “I think one of the most iconic scenes that I remember from Superman II [was] when he loses his powers and he’s in the diner, and he gets beat up, and then he goes back and got the guy. Hindsight is 20/20, but we could have ripped that scene off pretty easily, and that would have been fun,” he said.
In a twist of irony, Superman & Lois did a variation of that scene on their show, which stars Tyler Hoechlin as Clark Kent… but what ties it back to Smallville is that the person he confronted in the diner was played by Adrian McMorran — “Jeremy Creek” himself from the very first episode of Smallville! As Jeph Loeb famously would say, “It’s all connected!”
See Tom and more Smallville stars at Creation’s “Salute to Smallville” in October!