‘Cobra Kai’ Is Ending, But There’s Still a Bright Future For the ‘Karate Kid’ Franchise
When Ralph Macchio goes out into the world, it’s not uncommon for kids as young as seven or eight to run up to him and beg for a photo. “They act like they’re meeting Santa Claus,” he says. “They go, ‘Hey, don’t you play the dad on my favorite show?’ I go, ‘Yeah, that’s me. I’m the dad on your favorite show.’ Dude, it’s awesome.”
This isn’t a turn of events that Macchio, 63, possibly could have expected just a few years ago, when most of Hollywood had dismissed him as an Eighties has-been. But he also couldn’t have expected a trio of superfans — Josh Heald, Jon Hurwitz, and Hayden Schlossberg — to revive his iconic character Daniel LaRusso and the rest of the Karate Kid universe for a sequel streaming series, Cobra Kai. Nor could he have expected that series, which wraps up Feb. 13 when the final five episodes drop on Netflix, to rack up astronomical streaming numbers across six seasons. (The Season Six premiere alone notched “1.1 billion minutes viewed in the show’s first week of availability,” according to Netflix.)
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“Sometimes I use the word ‘stupid’ when talking about Cobra Kai because it’s just stupid how successful it’s become,” says Macchio. “But that’s really underselling it. I think a lot of credit goes back to the original filmmakers back in ’84 and the writer Robert Mark Kamen. And then Jon, Hayden, and Josh came in from a different angle and breathed newness into it. We’ve had such a warm embrace from close to four generations, and they’re all be waiting for the big finale, which really lands.”
When we last saw LaRusso, his rival turned friend Johnny Lawrence, and the karate students they’ve been mentoring in the Miyagi-do and Cobra Kai dojos across all six seasons, a vicious brawl had just broken out at the international Sekai Taikai karate tournament in Barcelona that took the life of gifted Cobra Kai fighter Kwon Jae-Sung. When the series resumes, everyone is back in their home countries and working to put the tragedy behind them. That process gets interrupted when the Sekai Taikai organizers decide to finish the tournament, pulling everyone back together for one final shot at redemption.
Given its comfortable perch as one of the biggest hits on Netflix, Cobra Kai probably could have been renewed for another few seasons, but the creators felt it was time to wrap everything up. “By the time we were done with Season Five, we really did feel like, ‘OK, there’s only so much that we can keep doing to amp this up before it becomes a karate tournament in space,'” says Schlossberg. Instead, they treated this final season as “our Rocky IV,” Schlossberg says. “They’re going to be fighting next-level international baddies, and let’s bring it home after that.'”
Bringing it home was no easy feat considering the size of the of the Cobra Kai cast and the need to resolve every character’s storyline. “Our nonstop expanding cast was something that we enjoyed, but also made things harder on ourselves,” says Hurwitz. “We’re a half-hour show with a limited budget and limited real estate, but as we introduced all these characters that we loved, it was hard to say goodbye to them.”
As the team wrote out the final season, they put notecards on a wall with names of every single character, nearly 25 in total, and started figuring out ways to conclude their arcs that fit into the puzzle of the overall story. “In the previous five episodes, for example, [Daniel’s son] Anthony and [his antagonist] Kenny had a big episode that worked through their big issue that they were going through,” says Hurwitz. “And with each character, we tried to find those moments where they can have their big final scene, even if they appear in later scenes, so their character’s journey would be a fulfilling one.”
The central character of Cobra Kai, however, remains Johnny Lawrence, who has been portrayed by William Zabka since the original Karate Kid in 1984. To most viewers, Lawrence was a pure villain in that movie, but the Cobra Kai creators saw something more they could tap into when they gathered to watch the bonus features on the 20th anniversary DVD back in 2004.
“Billy Zabka was talking about how his approach to Johnny Lawrence was that he was just another kid in the high school,” says Hurwitz. “He was trying to turn over a new leaf. There was a girl that he was in love with and he was trying to repair that relationship. And then this new kid moves in and gets in the way of that.”
At the climax of The Karate Kid, LaRusso defeats Lawrence at the All Valley tournament with a crane kick to the face. The 1986 sequel begins in the immediate aftermath, when Lawrence’s sensei John Kreese, played by Martin Kove, viciously chokes him in the parking lot of the arena where the tournament took place. It’s a crucial moment in Lawrence’s life that echoes throughout the entire run of Cobra Kai, especially after Kreese pops back into the storyline.
“When Robert Mark Kamen wrote that [choking scene], he really wanted to underline that Johnny wasn’t the villain,” says Heald. “There was one villain, not a dojo full of them. We leaned into that on Cobra Kai. We wanted to ask, ‘What makes a bully? What’s going on behind the scenes? What don’t you know about somebody who antagonized you that makes that at least makes you empathize a little bit with their experience?'”
In the final episodes of Cobra Kai, Zabka and Kove have a moment back in that same parking lot where they finally address the abuse that took place there. “It’s a guy who has a father who abused him,” says Schlossberg. “How do you come to terms with that? It feels wrong to be like, ‘I forgive you and let’s hug it out.’ That doesn’t feel honest. And yet the thing that’s been holding Johnny back is all this anger and hatred that he’s had for Kreese, and it’s like, ‘Well, how do you let that go while also acknowledging the abuse?'”
It’s an incredibly emotional scene that displays Zabka’s full range of talents as an actor. (Hey, Emmy voters, please take note.) It also underlines his character’s importance to Cobra Kai, even though Macchio receives top billing. “I know my character has to service that Johnny Lawrence redemption story, which is the arc of the Cobra Kai series,” says Macchio. “Sometimes LaRusso needs to be a thorn in his side to show Johnny’s growth. There have been times that that’s been challenging to navigate. But Daniel is a good friend to Johnny, and it even becomes a bromance for those guys.”
LaRusso does have a significant arc of his own throughout Cobra Kai, and much of it has to do with accepting the loss of his mentor, Mr. Miyagi. “It would be shocking to even do a Karate Kid story without Mr. Miyagi,” says Schlossberg. “And so we decided to make his absence a story. Let’s make it the fact that this is a guy who had this perfect, Jedi-like master mentor, but now he’s the one in that position, and he feels that pressure to do his best. Johnny and Daniel are both having their separate father issues. For us, that was something meaty, and something people our age can relate to.”
Mr. Miyagi is referenced countless times throughout Cobra Kai. LaRusso regularly visits his grave, and the late Pat Morita is seen is many flashbacks. But near the end of the series, they decided it was time to go a step further by giving Daniel and Miyagi one last scene together in a dream sequence. Without giving away any spoilers, we can say that it required the estate of Pat Morita to give their blessing, and plenty of CGI and Hollywood magic work to bring the character back to life.
“This was something I’d always asked for in the series,” says Macchio. “I didn’t necessarily need to have the human Miyagi on the show, but a deeper dive into Daniel’s self-doubt. It’s that conversation with your father or the person you most admire that you wish you could have when you feel like you’re falling short, and you just want to ask those one or two questions. I felt it was really important for the show to have that, and the fact that it’s a dream sequence gives you a little wiggle room, since it’s all in his mind.”
When Cobra Kai began back in 2018, Pat Morita was the only actor from the original films who had died. It gave the creators an opportunity to slowly roll out many of them over time, including Terry Silver (Thomas Ian Griffith), Ali Mills (Elisabeth Shue), Chozen Toguchi (Yuji Okumoto), Mike Barnes (Sean Kanan), Kumiko (Tamlyn Tomita), and Jessica Andrews (Robyn Lively). They even brought back nearly the entire OG Cobra Kai gang — including Tommy (Rob Garrison) — whose character died in the show shortly before the actor died in real life.
The only original Coba Kai holdout was Chad McQueen (son of legendary actor Steve McQueen), who portrayed Dutch in the 1984 film. Viewers were told that Dutch was in prison, but the possibility of his return lingered until McQueen’s sudden death from organ failure in September 2024. Prior to the sixth season, all three Cobra Kai creators traveled to his house in Palm Springs to talk about the possibility of him participating in the show.
“He showed us all this amazing memorabilia from his father’s movies and told us all these great stories,” says Hurwitz. “We had a scene planned for him that was going to be very late in the season and it was a really nice moment between him and Johnny. But unfortunately, by the time we were actually filming it, he wasn’t in good enough health to join us. But the character Dutch looms large in the Karate Kid universe, and we will treasure being able to get to know him a little bit right before the end.”
They also attempted to finally get Hilary Swank on the show to revive her Julie Pierce character from 1994’s The Next Karate Kid. “She just didn’t want to do it for whatever the reason,” says Macchio. “It just didn’t make sense for whatever was going on in her life. I wasn’t deep into any of those conversations, I just knew they took a stab at it.”
Their stab included a storyline where LaRusso learns a dark secret from Mr. Miyagi’s past that involved a stolen necklace. Many fans predicted it was going to lead him to Julie Pierce, and that scenario would have indeed played out if Swank had agreed to be on the show. “We started gaming things out in the writers room, but before we got too deep, we had to reach out to Hilary and find out would she be willing to come and play with us,” says Heald. “We didn’t want to paint ourselves into a corner if she didn’t want to do it. We never got so deep we wrote dialogue for her. We didn’t have any cards on the wall.”
“We had the impetus of an idea of how she would come in, because we always want to treat a legacy character coming back in a special way that doesn’t just feel like they’re playing the hits,” Heald continues. “She provided a great mystery and a great group of questions that we would have to ask ourselves: ‘Who knows about her? Had she and Daniel been in touch at all over the years? It would seem to reason that she would’ve been at Mr. Miyagi’s funeral. Where is she now?’ We had all these fun roads to go down, but we didn’t get to go down them. We’ll have to see what might happen in this universe if we’re fortunate enough to continue writing within it. She’s a character that we have a lot of excitement to revisit.”
Heald, Hurwitz, and Schlossberg are done playing in this world for the time being, but Macchio dove back in shortly after Coba Kai wrapped when he shot the movie Karate Kid: Legends with Jackie Chan and newcomer Ben Wang. It ties together the original four Karate Kid movies with the 2010 remake, which stared Chan as the Miyagi-like Mr. Han and Jaden Smith as his young protégé. According to conventional Karate Kid wisdom, the Miyagi-verse and the Han-verse were separate realms, so “connecting the worlds was the challenge,” Macchio says, but the filmmakers came up with a solution.
“They figured out a way to do that that is organic to a scene in Karate Kid 2 that people on the internet are starting to figure out,” Macchio says, “which explains that karate comes from kung fu, which is the truth.”
The movie picks up a couple of years after the events of Cobra Kai, and involves LaRusso training another young student alongside Mr. Han. “This is a different version of Daniel,” says Macchio. “He’s more at peace with his life, and more Miyagi, in a way.”
The Cobra Kai creative team had nothing to do with the movie, and didn’t even learn it was happening until they were gearing up to create Season Six of their show. “Our main contribution was just making sure that there were no contradictions and that one thing wasn’t going to negatively affect the other,” says Schlossberg. “We read a draft of the script and gave our thoughts.”
They also met with director Jonathan Entwistle. “He’s a great guy and big fan of Cobra Kai,” says Hurwitz. “It’s interesting, because it’s not really a continuation of Cobra Kai per se. It’s a new Karate Kid story. And Daniel LaRusso plays a role in that story, so all that needed to happen was that the Daniel LaRusso who appeared in that movie made sense as the Daniel LaRusso that we left Cobra Kai with.”
Do any Cobra Kai characters appear in the movie? “Maybe yes, maybe no,” says a tight-lipped Macchio. “I don’t know. I don’t have an answer for that.”
That possibility would be news to the Cobra Kai guys. “We have not seen the movie and we’ve only read an early script,” says Heald. “I would imagine somebody would’ve said something to us if they were doing that, but we just don’t know.”
If the movie is successful, it could very easily lead to the world of Cobra Kai coming to the big screen with the direct involvement of Heald, Hurwitz, and Schlossberg. “We leave certain fruit on the vine at the end of Cobra Kai intentionally, whether it’s for ourselves or for another generation to come along and reimagine a story 40 years down the line, or for any new branch to spin off,” says Heald. “We weren’t interested in completely burning down the world and saying, ‘That’s it. Lock it up and put it away.’ This is a vibrant, alive universe… There are endless possibilities for the future.”
And should a Cobra Kai film come together at some point, Macchio says he’ll be on board. “Why not keep the party going, as long as it can be rooted in some form of genuine truth?” he says. “And maybe one day we can do my Gran Torino version.”
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