Smallville animated sequel to remain in Phantom Zone

With another Superman taking flight soon, Tom Welling must channel some superhuman patience before voicing Big Blue again.

By Matt Schimkowitz | March 23, 2025 | 6:42pm

Photo by Kevin Winter (Getty Images)

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Smallville animated sequel to remain in Phantom Zone

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The bad news keeps coming for fans of the CW’s teen Superman show, Smallville. Now in its 14th year of cancellation, the show, which stars Tom Welling as a teen Clark Kent and Michael Rosenbaum as Lex Luthor, will stay that way for now, despite some talk of an animated sequel series Rosenbaum teased last year. Unfortunately, with Warner Bros. Discovery retconning its previous 10 years of superhero movies, restarting its DC cinematic universe, and opting to shelve finished movies instead of releasing them, Smallville: The Animated Series remains in suspended animation, according to series co-creator Alfred Gough. Gough blames the delay on WBD’s most recent and endlessly turbulent “regime change.” This current regime of DC property management, led by WBD CEO David Zaslav and DC Studios CEOs James Gunn and Peter Safran, wants to get another Superman off the ground and will do so when David Cornsweat dons the cape for Superman this summer.

“Warners has obviously gone through a lot, and I think the fact that they are in the process of rebooting Superman again, kind of unfortunately, I think, keeps our thing off the table for a bit,” Gough told the Talk Ville podcast, a Smallville podcast hosted by Welling and the show’s Lex Luthor Michael Rosenbaum. “Everything comes around in one form or another, I just read the other day that they are rebooting Buffy for Hulu.”