I raised a cynical blonde eyebrow when I initially heard that Smallville creators Al Gough and Miles Millar were leaving the series so they'd have more time to write big Hollywood blockbusters.  I'm sure the money for scripting summer tent pole movies is quite impressive, but I can't imagine penning such nonsense is creatively fulfilling.  Not that all big budget movies are nonsense, of course.  Especially not this summer, when we've had amazing fare like The Dark Knight, Hellboy II and Iron Man in theaters.  However, Gough and Millar didn't write any of those.  They wrote The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor.  Did they really leave Smallville so they could hack out third-rate sequels to movies people barely cared about in the first place?

Lest you think I'm being hard on the Smallville creators, let me list off their other feature film writing credits: Shanghai Noon, Showtime and Herbie: Fully Loaded.  Horrifying, isn't it?  Shanghai Noon was a modest critical and box office success, but the others were massive flops that the critics ripped apart mercilessly.  The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor has also been shredded by critics, with only nine percent of them giving it a positive review according to Rotten Tomatoes.  Sure, the film raked in $40 million last weekend, but that doesn't make a movie with a $145 million budget a massive hit.

As a Smallville fan, I know that Gough and Millar have the ability to tell smart, compelling stories.  Aside from their story credit on Spider-Man 2, none of the work they've done on the big screen proves this.  The problem may not be the writers themselves, but the complicated Hollywood process.  The duo was able to have a lot of creative control over the first seven seasons of Smallville, but when you're writing a movie that costs hundreds of millions of dollars the script is often rushed, rewritten and disrespected.  The script for something like The Mummy 3 is nothing but an excuse to string together special effects sequences.  The writers are barely needed.

Due to Gough and Millar's decision to leave Smallville as it nears the end of its run, I have to assume they're more interested in money than creative fulfillment.  Those big Hollywood paydays must be nice, but I can't help but wish they'd have seen their small screen creation through to the end.  Even without the involvement of Gough and Millar, I can guarantee you the final seasons of Smallville will be a heck of a lot more interesting than Brendan Fraser battling CGI.


- Don Williams, BuddyTV Staff Writer
Source: Rotten Tomatoes
(Image courtesy of the CW)