In late 2019, Smallville returned for one scene only in The CW’s multi-show Crisis on Infinite Earths crossover, as Tom Welling and Erica Durance reprised their roles as Clark Kent and Lois Lane in an episode of Batwoman. The scene took place on “Earth-167” and was written by Smallville veterans Don Whitehead and Holly Henderson, but many fans were left wondering why we didn’t get to see that the characters from Smallville were restored at the end of the crossover, where we learned that other Earths such as the ones occupied by Swamp Thing, the Titans, and Brandon Routh’s Superman had been brought back into the multiverse by Stephen Amell’s Spectre.
Andy Behbakht of Multiverse of Color had Arrowverse showrunner Marc Guggenheim on his Showrunner Whisperer podcast which dropped part 1 today, and he addressed the omission.
“Why didn’t we have Smallville? I’ll be honest with you. I think it was two reasons,” Guggenheim responded. “Number one, it never occurred to me until I got the question on Twitter that people think we did blow up the Smallville universe. So part of it was that, and part of it was, we’d obviously seen Clark and Lois in episode two. For the most part, the ‘going around the horn’ [closing sequence] was to see all the universes and all the characters that we didn’t get to see,” he continued.
Guggenheim confirmed that if he had it to do all over again, that it would be “awesome” to have a shot of Lois and Clark on the farm kissing within that sequence. “But yeah, sorry, I dropped the ball on that,” he admitted. Additionally, under SAG rules, an actor gets paid for each episode they appear in, and Tom Welling was only contracted for the second episode. “We certainly didn’t have the money for that, but that really wasn’t a factor. It, quite frankly, just didn’t occur to me,” Marc said.
You can listen to the entire Showrunner Whisperer conversation with Marc Guggenheim here or on the YouTube embed below.