Superman Movieverse Forum

How old is Clark supposed to be in StM?
The Mankiewicz  script indicates the little girl on the train (Lois) is 6. Clark is 17 or so.

We know Clark went to the fortress at 18 and left 12 years later. Obviously Lois wasn't 19 when Clark was hired. So how old do you think she was and by extension, how old was he? 

I'm all for keeping it real, and keeping in canon when you can realistically do so.  If the reality test fails, I'd throw it out.  Now, for the canon ages of Lois and Clark...

It seems to me, that there is a little room for interpretation on the twelve years of Kryptonian training.  Is that time spent exclusive of time on Earth, or could he be multi-tasking?  Could he have gone to college and held down jobs with small papers while he continued his Kryptonian education?  I assume that he multi-tasked, and I've pretty much stuck with the assumption that Clark was 30 in S:TM.  Depending on how strictly you interpret the movie scripts, he'd be somewhere between 35 and 38 in Superman returns.

And for Lois.  She clearly an accomplished reporter, and top of her field in  S:TM.  Clearly not a fresh faced kid right out of college.  I'd place her in the range 26-28.  Not that much younger than Clark.

This brings up another point.  A 6-year-old Lois on the train to the 17-year-old Clark, making her 19 to his 30 is just nuts.  Why keep it?

I'd be especially quick to throw something out that was just thrown in for a cameo.  Two out of three of the cameos I can think of from the movies just don't work:

• Noel Neill's Ella Lane in S:TM (Doesn't work - makes Lois too young compared to Clark)
• Noel Neill's Gertrude Vanderworth in SR (Works)
• Jack Larson's Bo the Bartender in SR (Doesn't work.  Makes Jimmy an alcoholic, and would Clark really cut work his first day back?)

Ah, but the age on his driver's license is the telling point here - even not aging in space, his legal/chronological age is what's in question.

Personally, I've gone with the multi-tasking during the Kryptonian training as well - college and travel and establishing himself as a writer.

And Lois must be fairly close in age, chronologically, to Clark - although biologically after SR, he's now younger than she is by several years (assuming he was in stasis and didn't age).

I'd say closer to 35, since I've always read in DC that he's in his early-to-mid 30's.

Miss Lois wrote on Oct 30^th, 2008 at 3:10pm:


Hmm, I'd forgotten about that. With the blurring between the movies, the Silver Age comics, the Byrne Man-of-Steel stuff, and the Birthright stuff integrated into the modern comics, I sometimes forget we're talking strictly about the Movieverse on these forums.
Silly, really, what with the great big neon sign reading "The Movieverse Fanfiction Forums" up above.
Or, as one of my uncles would have put it:
"MA, GET TH' SNAKEBITE KIT AGAIN!"

The film script identifies the little girl as Lois Lane, but the dialogue never made it into the final version of the film and the actors were uncreditied.

So, this could go either way.