The 'Cobra Kai' Creators Talk Season Four, Spinoffs, and the Karate Universe That Could Rival Marvel
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The origin story of Cobra Kai—you might know it as the biggest show in the world right now—begins, more or less, about five years ago in an undisclosed Mexican restaurant. The table: Longtime best friends Hayden Schlossberg, Jon Hurwitz, and Josh Heald, pitching their childhood hero, William Zabka, on a Karate Kid spinoff. The pitch: A TV series flipping the perspective of the beloved trilogy from the '80s. Turns out? Danny LaRusso was the bully this whole time, stealing Johnny Lawrence's girlfriend and emasculating him to the point where he would never be able to get on with his life.
"His mind was so blown and he needed to hear our pitch probably two or three times before he sunk in what we were saying to him," Heald says. "He kept sending away the waiter, so we just ate three or four baskets of chips in the course of an hour and a half before we finally ordered our lunch."
Lo and behold, Cobra Kai landed on YouTube Red in 2018 to glowing reviews. The trio of Schlossberg, Hurwitz, and Heald somehow managed to roast the '80s and its lovable, Johnny Lawrence-esque meatheads, while introducing a brand-new cast of crane-kicking heroes and villains. In the summer of 2020—AKA, when we were all sitting around our TVs—Cobra Kai found a new home at Netflix, with its nearly 200 million subscribers. It promptly blew the hell up. Suddenly? Schlossberg, Hurwitz, and Heald, who grew up Karate Kid buffs and had been thinking about the story that would become Cobra Kai since 2001, found themselves prescribing the best medicine on TV.
Mr. Miyagi never quite delivered an Uncle Ben-esque "With great power, comes great responsibility," line. But the principle applies here. After the success of Season Three of Cobra Kai, which debuted on Netflix January 1, Schlossberg, Hurwitz, and Heald could really go anywhere with the Miyagi-verse. (Yeah, they have a name for it. Think the Marvel Cinematic Universe, but for any Karate Kid movie where Pat Morita shows up as Mr. Miyagi.) Maybe that simply means continuing to bat 1.o00 with a killer Season Four of Cobra Kai. Or, you know, speaking of Marvel? Treating Cobra Kai as the Iron Man to a hundred-some, shared-universe stories over the next 20 (or more!) years.
We Zoomed with Schlossberg, Hurwitz, and Heald to discuss the journey of Cobra Kai. Including, but not limited to: Chips with Zabka, Season Three's throwdown at Château LaRusso, the potential return of Terry Silver, and spinoff ideas. Oh, and most importantly? The art of the needle drop.
JON HURWITZ: We're all gathered around.
ESQUIRE: Am I massive on your screen right now?
JOSH HEALD: Yeah. You look big but we look very small.
HAYDEN SCHLOSSBERG: We're looking up at a giant flat screen of you.
ESQ: Oh, no.
HURWITZ: No. That's good. It's all right.
ESQ: Where are you guys?
HEALD: This is our production office.
SCHLOSSBERG: Atlanta.
ESQ: You guys finally had somebody call the police this season.
SCHLOSSBERG: Well, Amanda goes to the police, right?
HEALD: Yeah. Kreese got there first.
ESQ: Who was it that was finally like: Yeah. We've got to probably write this in at some point—someone going to the authorities?
HURWITZ: Some of the fun of the show obviously is people handling their own business in this karate rivalry—and things escalated to a point where it felt like it was time. This season it was like OK, it pushed too far and Amanda was not going to let them keep it going the same way they were. And as you guys said, Kreese having to outsmart them and go there first.
ESQ: Amanda LaRusso is probably the strongest LaRusso at this point. She gives the best hit on Kreese since the nose honk.
HEALD: In the power rankings, she was the most unexpected LaRusso to hit somebody. It was fun to take a character who's completely on the periphery of this karate rivalry and suck her in and have her experience the insanity of it—and actually get to a place where she throws a punch through a slap. That particular one was meant to be a stunt slap, but she actually connected the right in his face and they kept going because it was magic.
ESQ: Martin Kove took the slap?
HEALD: Yeah. Courtney didn't really have any stunt experience before, so her stunt coordinators showed her how to do it. And Martin's taken many punches and slaps to the face on screen over the years and he was a good scene partner. There was a lot of encouragement to follow through and not hold up. The one on screen was the one that she just got and this reaction was real.
ESQ: When you guys were convincing the original stars to come back, William Zabka said you guys sat down at a Mexican restaurant to hash everything out.
SCHLOSSBERG: We were excited to tell him that news. We imagined that he would have questions and reservations and everything like that, but we assumed that that would be good. And it was fun seeing the look on his face like, "Wait. What? Is this real?"
HURWITZ: I think we went in with the opposite of anxiety about it, to be honest. Our expectation was: we're about to go and talk to one of our childhood heroes who we loved so much from the Karate Kid and a bunch of '80s movies, whom we've been talking about since high school in a major way. And we're about to blow his mind because we knew that he had enough of an interest in exploring his persona.
HEALD: I remember just being hungry because it was lunch. But his mind was so blown and he needed to hear our pitch probably two or three times before he sunk in what we were saying to him. He kept sending away the waiter, so we just ate three or four baskets of chips in the course of an hour and a half before we finally ordered our lunch.
ESQ: You really do seem true, genuine fans who would be just thinking about this stuff in your head even if it wasn't for the show.
HURWITZ: That's the thing. The three of us have been friends since [we were] teenagers and we bonded over movies, comedy, TV. We're like any other people in our age range who like all the same stuff. We separately fell in love with The Karate Kid when we were young, and it's one of those movies that you bonded people over. For years, we had been talking about it. We talked about the idea of Cobra Kai initially as a movie as early as probably 2001, 2002.
HEALD: We dressed up as the skeletons for Halloween 2001.
ESQ: If you were thinking about it as early as 2001—what would you have done if you guys were handed the keys to The Karate Kid: Part IV?
HURWITZ: At that point, if you look at the early 2000s, it was already 15 years after high school for them, so we still had the similar kind of concept. Although, I think that the thing that we're happy about is we're glad that that version never happened. We love having the five hours of real estate— and also the age in the characters, to be exploring a whole new generation as well within the story.
ESQ: The world that you created has so many questions. There's Danny meeting Amanda, there's the early days of the car dealership, there's the worst of Johnny's life... you must have other stories in the Miyagi-verse, right?
HEALD: All the time. Like Jon said, we've never stopped talking about Cobra Kai. It just happened that our conversations have now become a television show. We talk about all eras of these characters and all eras of Cobra Kai and Miyagi-Do and where it was, where it came from, how it evolved, where it's going. We've always felt that this franchise is as big as Marvel. To a portion of people who grew up in the '80s, The Karate Kid and Mr. Miyagi were bigger IP than even Iron Man. It was just sitting there and we never stopped thinking about it. When we approach it, we think about it as Star Wars, we think about it as Iron Man. To us, the possibilities are limitless.
HURWITZ: Anything that you can imagine spinning off from the original Karate Kid movies, we've most likely talked about in one way or another… We have some very, very big ideas. We have some small ideas. We have ideas that are different tones and ideas that we feel are more one hour, ideas that are more half hour, ideas that wouldn't be live-action necessarily. We keep thinking about it. We developed some of these in our heads. And it’s our hope that with the new audience on Netflix that has found the show and has celebrated the show that it will put some wind in the sails of this franchise and allow us to realize the potential of it.
ESQ: What do you think it is about the show that resonates in this time specifically?
HURWITZ: I think it's the throwback and nostalgic quality of it. We write it with a way that's for everybody. It's that show that you can watch if you are 13, or if you're 30, or if you're 80. There's an access point for you, whether it's looking back at the past with regret, or looking forward to the future with who I want to become. People we knew [said], "I haven't watched a show that my kid and I have enjoyed together to the same degree in so many years."... This show feels like that show that you're gathered around and looking at each other, and celebrating the victories, and feeling the goosebumps, and crying about the losses, because the movie was that way.
ESQ: Watching Season Three, there are new hints of darkness. Like Johnny taking the dagger in the finale. You talked about how in Karate Kid II, it's all life or death stakes. And just looking online seeing all the kid actors bulking up, you almost feel this Harry Potter effect where you could see the series almost going darker and growing up with the kids.
SCHLOSSBERG: As they did with Karate Kid, it's like, OK, you saw a tournament, now it's got to be life or death. You keep building that up. I think at the same time, though, we're aware that if you just keep doing that, it's going to become so ridiculous that we might lose touch with the magic of the original… In terms of the darkness, it's really just the nature of where the story is going when you're exploring Kreese's backstory, a character who's so tormented and has such a dark worldview. You're going to go to dark places. I think for us, it really goes back to giving credit to younger viewers that they can handle some of this stuff too. When we were young, we watched plenty of movies and TV shows where some pretty messed up things were happening.
HEALD: In Rocky III, Mick died.
SCHLOSSBERG: We always talk about how today there are so many channels and specific shows that are designed [to be] a bullseye for everyone. If you're a 10-year-old boy or a 10-year-old girl, there's all these shows that are meant for you specifically. But people of all ages can enjoy more complex storytelling. I remember being a kid watching The Golden Girls and relating to those characters and seeing my grandmother in those characters as well.
ESQ: If you're talking about the balancing act of all the mini-battles, I feel like that doesn't come across any better than in that final fight at the LaRusso house.
HURWITZ: For the fight at the house, initially we were going to be doing that fight at Miyagi-Do and we had all these plans there. And then, because of scheduling conflicts and weather and all this stuff, we ended up being forced into having to do it somewhere else and we were like, "What about at the LaRusso house?"
ESQ: It’s great. We get so into it at the LaRusso house because that's a venue we're so familiar with, but we haven't seen beat to shit in the way that Miyagi-do has been.
HEALD: At first you don't see it. Wait a minute. They're going to vandalize somebody's house. They're going to kick the door in and they're going to approach it through a window. That kind of felt more believable at this house that nobody lives in when it's just a dojo, but now it's a house in a neighborhood.
SCHLOSSBERG: Now it's a home invasion. It begs the question with the police and all of that. I would love to see how that shapes up next season.
ESQ: I know you guys can't really talk about whether or not Terry Silver will be in the next season, but what interests you in that character? The guy seems like he was written to be in Cobra Kai, not The Karate Kid III.
SCHLOSSBERG: There's what Terry Silver represents in general. The '80s new big bad sequel guy. He's the Ivan Drago. Or Clubber Lang. And in Karate Kid they were like, "Okay. How do we top ourselves?" Now, there's this new evil karate guy. He just enjoys every moment of being evil more than anybody. When you compare him to the Emperor or Kreese or Vader, he's like, “This is what I was meant to do. I'm enjoying every moment of this." He's laughing. You think about what he's doing, tormenting this teenager. He's an insane person by any stretch of the imagination, and yet seemingly he's cultured and has his act together.
HURWITZ: There's nothing we love more than when there's something that is ridiculous from the past movies and we have to find a way to ground it the best that we can. What was fun for us about Season Three was instead of just going back and being like, "Okay. Let's bring Terry Silver back and go the way that we did," instead we were like, "You know what? Let's go back to where Cobra Kai came from and Kreese's backstory which ties into Terry Silver” … We brought Terry Silver to the story in a way that people weren't expecting. We'll see where things go in the future.
ESQ: The entire nuclear energy CEO bit just feels like a joke that you guys wrote.
HEALD: DynaTox is such a beautifully caricaturistic story of an eccentric millionaire/billionaire in the '80s who's taking calls in bathtubs and steam rooms. We love a challenge. I'll say that.
ESQ: How much of the Season Four writers' room happened over Zoom?
HURWITZ: Pretty much all of it. When we're on set, in our spare time, instead of talking about other things, we were just talking about the show all the time. There was a lot of talk about Season Four, Season Five. And then, even during the off-season, we were sending texts to each other at all hours of the night just talking about it. But we did our proper writers' room and it was all on Zoom. It was great.
ESQ: I know you guys have said you do have that endgame in mind, but just for the purposes of the Season Four, what were those conversations like?
SCHLOSSBERG: It's clear we ended Season Three with this high-stakes tournament agreement they made. We'll see how that plays out. You could speculate as to what we would do with that in the season, but that certainly is the jumping off point. We've seen the tournament in Season One. Now, allegiances have shifted, certain students are on different sides, and the stakes have never been higher as what that tournament means… Going into Season Four, you have a lot of fun things I think to look forward to as opposed to at the end of Season Two, [when] we blew up the world... In Season Four, there's wish fulfillment for the fans of seeing Johnny and Daniel teaming up to stop [Kreese].
HEALD: In Season Two, we intentionally ended on an Oh, no. Season three has a Fuck yeah. It's delivering on the premise of the series, which is that these guys are finally on the same page with the same goal. Season Four, we'll answer that question, "Will they be able to stay on that same page?"
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SCHLOSSBERG: I can say it's more focused in the sense of in season three, everybody was split apart. [You have] Johnny and Daniel and Kreese over there, so you know right from the beginning you have a lot of these characters in scenes together.
ESQ: You guys are the masters of the needle drop, parsing out all these '80s songs. When are we getting the “Glory Of Love” drop? Is that the very last episode?
HURWITZ: You never know.
SCHLOSSBERG: Some are like, "Okay. This song, we know fans are waiting for," but because they're waiting for it, it's got to be awesome or unexpected, and it's another tool in our arsenal that we want to play with.
HURWITZ: I'd say it's a group effort though. It's one of those things, that sometimes they're written into the script where we know ahead of time. We knew when we wanted to have “Back In Black” for example. And that’s what we ended up naming the episode
HEALD: These needle drops are also very expensive. We try to play them as long as possible because it doesn't cost us any more money to continue playing it, but if we stop it, then we have to pay when we start it again. Our mind is always on like, "Is there a montage that earns it?” We want to live in the feeling of what the song's telling us.
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