The Karate Kid revival series Cobra Kai is ringing in 2021 with its brand-new Season 3, and hopefully, many more seasons will come in the years that follow. As excited as many fans may be about bingeing the new season when it becomes available, there's always that crowd already looking ahead and wanting to know just how much more they can expect to see.
I had a chance to speak to Cobra Kai's co-creators about Season 3 and more and learned a bit about the plans they have for the series' future. 2020 may have been a rough year for some productions, but co-creator Jon Hurwitz revealed that the show is in a good spot story-wise when it comes to Season 4 and beyond.
Season 4 is fully mapped out. We have plans beyond that. We haven’t had firm discussions with Netflix as to when the series will end but we have expressed that if on their end there is a period of time where they’re like ‘It's about enough of this Cobra Kai business,’ to give us a heads up so that we can wrap things up appropriately. I think we’re going to have the right amount of runway to get it done in a way that’s going to be fulfilling for fans and leave the characters in a place that’s a fulfilling close to the story with potential for more stories down the road.
Cobra Kai was renewed for Season 4 ahead of Season 3's premiere, and given the show's increased popularity since the first two seasons were added to Netflix, it stands to reason that it could run for quite a while. The creators are prepared for whatever scenario may come in the future, and whatever talent may be available to return to the series.
It also requires some idea of what the endgame will be, which Jon Hurwitz confirmed he and the other creators are already considering. The co-creator spoke about the writing process to this point and the challenge of deciding what to incorporate when there's only so much time to tell stories in an individual season.
From the beginning, we’ve known where we’d like to end things in Cobra Kai. In terms of the number of seasons we’ve never had that specifically nailed down. We always talk about when we were writing Season 1 we had all these ideas on the whiteboard, and then you realize, okay, I only have five hours of time and these 30-minute episodes to basically tell the story. Certain things that you wanted to do in Season 1 don’t get to happen until Season 2, Season 3, or still haven’t happened yet.
There's certainly more runway for Cobra Kai to tell a story compared to the time allotted to The Karate Kid films back in the day, but there are still limitations. Therefore, the co-creators are still sitting on some ideas they wrote all the way back in Season 1, some of which may be seen by viewers in Season 3.
And let's not forget, if there's one thing Hollywood loves more than revivals as of late, it's spinoffs. Co-creator Hayden Schlossberg signaled that expanding stories beyond the boundaries of the lives of Daniel LaRusso and Johnny Lawrence would be something they'd be interested in doing, similar to another iconic television franchise.
We look at something like Breaking Bad as an example of a great show that was on for a number of seasons and during the process of it created such a rich universe that you could explore it in other ways like Better Call Saul and El Camino. We love these characters and I don’t think our love is going to end. Hopefully, we keep these characters alive as long as possible.
Cobra Kai has established a lot of interesting new characters in its first two seasons, and there may come a day when one of them is the star of their own series. Of course, that's assuming everything goes right for all these characters in Season 3, which the end of Season 2 teased may not happen. We can only wait and see!
Cobra Kai Season 3 premieres on Netflix Friday, January 1. Continue to stick with CinemaBlend for more on the upcoming season, and for all news happening in television and movies.
