Tom Welling"s 6 Year Old Superman Comments Perfectly Justify A Modern Smallville Revival

Summary

• A few years ago, Tom Welling explained how Smallville's limited budget and technological constraints prevented the show from featuring Superman's full range of superpowers and VFX-heavy action.
• A Smallville revival featuring Tom Welling's Superman is now more feasible due to advancements in VFX technology and an increase in TV budgets.
• Although the Smallville Season 11 comic books and the Arrowverse's Crisis on Infinite Earths crossover have revisited Tom Welling's Clark Kent, a full-blown Smallville revival with VFX as polished as Superman & Lois' would do the show justice.

Smallville star Tom Welling already explained why a new season of the DC series could be released nowadays. A decade before the MCU and the DCEU started the golden age of superhero cinematic universes, Smallville built a prototypical live-action DC franchise filled with superheroes, supervillains, and vigilantes. Not only was this an impressive feat because Smallville broke new ground in the superhero genre in an era when it was only beginning to explode, but also because of the show's limited options when tackling a character as iconic and powerful as Superman.
Following a young Clark Kent, Smallville covered a great part of DC Comics' lore, including Smallville's version of the Justice League, the Legion of Super-Heroes, and even Superboy. Clark Kent also developed all his powers and faced many of his famous villains, including Lex Luthor, Brainiac, Doomsday, and Darkseid — all before Tom Welling's Clark Kent first donned the full Superman suit. However, Smallville's main focus always remained on Clark Kent's personal issues as a teenager and a young adult, with his relationships and inner conflict taking center stage over his world-saving adventures.
Smallville Avoided Superman In Part Because Of Budget Concerns A live-action DC series starring Superman in his prime can't avoid VFX-heavy sequences, but a young Clark Kent prequel has the perfect justification for less bombastic action. In 2001, VFX technology wasn't advanced enough to abound throughout entire episodes of multi-season sci-fi shows, and it was still rare for a high-concept TV series to receive a big budget for VFX, let alone retain it for ten consecutive seasons. Therefore, before Smallville shot a single episode, Smallville series creators Alfred Gough and Miles Millar decided to base Smallville's premise around Clark Kent's early years. In an interview with EW, Smallville star Tom Welling explains,

"We literally had a sit down where we talked about the show and I asked about the suit and the tights and the flying, and they said, 'No, absolutely not.' (...) At the time, because of where visual effects and special effects and stunts were, it would be too expensive. That's mainly why they save that for movies, more or less."

With Superman's full range of superpowers and abilities being an unlikely option for a smaller-scale show, Smallville' more restrained approach to Superman meant that the plot would be more intimate, which provided the opportunity to explore the character's inner conflict without VFX-heavy action sequences stealing all the attention. Of course, Smallville's plot increased in scope with every new season, but the focus remained on Clark Kent as a person, not as an invincible superhero. In the same EW interview, Tom Welling continues to explain why Smallville didn't double down on Clark Kent's superhero career, saying,

Part of the reason being is that show is about a teenager trying to figure out who he is. They felt that once Clark put on the cape and the suit, life became too easy, in a sense. They wanted to focus on who this character was before that.

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