The final season of Cobra Kai begins but does not end on July 18, 2024. Netflix is dividing season six into three parts, so Part 1 is only five episodes. Two more sets of five are coming, but creators Jon Hurwitz, Hayden Schlossberg, and Josh Heald are here to talk about the first five.
Season five of the Karate Kid series concluded with Daniel LaRusso (Ralph Macchio) defeating Terry Silver (Thomas Ian Griffith) in front of all the Cobra Kai students. John Kreese (Martin Kove) escaped from prison. As season six begins, many of Daniel and Johnny’s students are applying to college. There’s still the international Sekai Taikai Karate tournament to train for.
The end of Cobra Kai won’t be the end of The Karate Kid. Sony has announced a movie to co-star Macchio and Jackie Chan. Plus, Hurwitz, Schlossberg, and Heald have discussed spinoff possibilities, so we talked about all of that too.
Behind the Scenes of Cobra Kai Season 6 Part 1
Was it fun to explore new forms of bullying from college fraternities to realtors?
Josh Heald: “We’re always looking for new ways to spark a karate fight on this show. You know, with 50 episodes behind us and 15 in front of us, you need to find that new way into people kicking somebody in the face. So, the first five episodes certainly have a variety of those things happening.”
I won’t give away where the Sekai Taikai takes place, but does Georgia look like the international location you chose?
Jon Hurwitz: “Georgia at times looks like the location we’ve chosen because there’s plenty of interior Sekai Taikai fighting. But we did travel overseas to the real location as well. So, it’s a hybrid as we tend to always do on our show.”
Is Samantha (Mary Mouser) and Tory (Peyton List) trying to get along the real magic to write for?
Hayden Schlossberg: “This is the fun of the later seasons, and getting to the end is seeing these rivalries come together, to put those new friendships to the test. This season we do it both internally with a competition to see who gets to go to the Sekai Taikai and also who gets to be the captain of the team, to ultimately, once they get there, they’re going to have to face the best fighters in the world. All that competition and pressure is going to put the friendships to the test, and we love these characters and are rooting for them. We want to see all these rivalries come to a happy ending, but we also need the roller coaster.
The key, like I said before, is just making it where it’s a different roller coaster. You’re not exactly recognizing this pattern. You don’t know exactly what’s going to happen. But you have something to root for. When you get those glimpses of Tory and Sam actually hugging it out, because going into season six, they’re not enemies anymore but they’re not really friends. That’s kind of what the first five episodes are for them. Okay, are we friends? Can this work out? So yeah, it’s fun playing that out.”
Tory does a flip in one scene. That has to be VFX, right?
Josh Heald: “Peyton did a lot of her own work this season. Peyton’s come a long way with her martial arts. We do use doubles for all of our actors for things that the stunt team deems unsafe. So, I can’t remember for sure if that’s completely Tory or not in that moment, but I will say Peyton is doing way more karate this season for real than she’s ever done before. It’s powerful and some of her kicks and twists are really impressive and are 100% Peyton.”
I also noticed even the rest of Miyagi-Do in the background is still doing real drills and katas.
Jon Hurwitz: “We try to make sure that at all times there’s karate action going on in the background, that everyone’s fully engaged throughout the frame.”
Did you design the three-part season with two midseason finales?
Jon Hurwitz: “100%. When we were entering season six, the big question was will this be the final season or not? We felt like we needed more than 10 episodes to tell this story, but not necessarily 20. So, when we were talking with Sony and Netflix, the idea of 15 episodes and doing a super-sized final season came up, and with that was the desire to split it up in some kind of way.
For us, the logical splitting of the season was five, five, and five. We always write our season in five-part chunks. Usually, the season is 10 episodes. With two five-part chunks, there’s a midseason finale and then there’s the real finale. This time, we view it as sort of a three-act final season with three distinct chapters, each one telling its own story that’s part of the bigger story. It was really fun to structure the season that way.”
You’ve been clear you consider the Jackie Chan Karate Kid a different universe, so do you consider the upcoming Ralph and Jackie movie a multiverse thing?
Josh Heald: “For our circumstances, insomuch as Ralph Macchio’s Daniel LaRusso is in it, we are not involved in the production of that movie, but we are curious as everybody is to see what that vision looks like. We know it takes place after the events of our series concludes and is coming out after we’ve concluded the story that we’re telling, so we look forward to seeing what somebody else does with this character and how it continues this story.”
Is it flattering that the success of the show made another movie viable?
Jon Hurwitz: “Sure, yeah. When we approached Sony about Karate Kid all those years ago, nothing was really going on in the feature space. At the time, we were just like okay, maybe something’s going on in the feature space but we’re going to say no, but there could be something in the TV world. You guys do something in features. Didn’t seem like they were going to do anything with Johnny and Daniel, so let’s do our story. And it’s been amazing to see the fan reaction to the series.
I think you know that we approach the series with love of the franchise from the beginning. It’s been a blessing to make this, to make 65 episodes of the show and for the fans to respond to it the way they did and for Sony to feel like this was the time to do more Karate Kid movies, it’s exciting.”
Josh Heald: “We always felt like there would be another Jackie Chan Karate Kid movie from the beginning when we walked in and said, ‘Can we please play with this universe on television?’ So, it’s a little bit surprising to us that that movie is happening right now as opposed to seven years ago, I guess, but things take time to work themselves out.”
What is the status of the spinoffs of your own characters?
Hayden Schlossberg: “It’s funny. We’ve been so focused on landing the mothership that now that we’re back in LA, we’ve done most of the production, that’s something that comes into focus for us. We, without giving spoilers away, conclude our show in a way that hopefully people find as fitting for a variety of characters. We’ve been talking about delving into the past with Mr. Miyagi which we also get at in this final season a little bit.
So, we’re champing at the bit to do more. We just came up for air, and I think the question is exactly what those things are that we’re going to be working on, but it’s in our minds. It’s on our to-do list for sure. Just nothing official to say at this point in time.”
Did you become parents while making Cobra Kai, and did that change your idea of what kids go through or what you want to show them in entertainment?
Josh Heald: “Jon and I were already parents when we embarked upon this series. My wife and I had two out of our three kids. My daughter was born just after we completed production on the first season. So, we had a lot of ideas of what we wanted to say about parenting, but at the time we didn’t have teenagers. We had younger children seven years ago when we were starting the show. So, we were writing inasmuch from the timelessness of what we know from that really visceral time in your life when you’re 14, 15, 16, 17 years old and the universe, every moment feels like the most important thing in the world.
As our kids have grown up and we’ve continued to write this series, we take from life as much as we can in terms of making sure that our characters, our moments, our dialogue is honest and is consistent with teens today.”
Did you fit everything you wanted to in this final season? Was there anything you had to let go of?
Jon Hurwitz: “The final season, I think, ended perfectly for us. All the different stories and the balls that we were juggling, we felt like we needed 15 episodes to land everything. There are twists and turns in production. There are certain things where you’re not able to do a little thing here or a storyline there that maybe you had in your head, but in the absence of those are new opportunities and new exciting things that you come up with.
When we think about entering this series seven years ago and the Johnny and Daniel story, it was amazing being on set some of those final days with scenes that we’ve been talking about since before we started a writers room way back when. To finally be making those kinds of scenes and to take all these characters, the teenage characters that have grown over the course of these years where we had no idea the exact paths that they’d all be going to be finding fulfilling and fun ways to land their characters as well.”
You’ve also talked about beginning thinking about a movie and that became more viable as a series. When you first conceived it as a movie, did you have characters like Robby, Samantha, and Miguel in it?
Hayden Schlossberg: “It did not get that far because we’re talking back when we were making Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle. 20 years ago, we were thinking in terms of a Johnny Lawrence story, but we were thinking about it in terms of a movie. We knew that the likelihood of it happening because of how movies get made, you have to be not just a certain level of recognizable star but you have to have recently been in something in the last one year or two years or be the most up and coming thing of all time. It’s such a challenge to get a movie made and we knew that okay, there’s nostalgia for stuff but it just seemed unrealistic to do the kind of William Zabka/Ralph Macchio big-budget movie that we would want to do in our minds.
It wasn’t until Netflix started churning out TV series with a billboard with Kimmy Gibbler [from Fuller House] on it that we realized, ‘You know what? Maybe we could do this as a series’. Cut to six years later, I’m driving down Sunset Blvd and I see Thomas Ian Griffith as Terry Silver on a billboard and I’m like the dream came true. That was how to get this movie made. So, once it became a practical thing, that’s when we delved into new characters.”
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