“In our minds, Karate Kid was as big as Star Wars,” says Jon Hurwitz, one of the three showrunners of Cobra Kai.
He had met one of the other showrunners, Hayden Schlossberg, in high school, and the other, Josh Heald, in college. All three were New Jersey boys who had been captivated since the age of six by the story of Daniel LaRusso (Ralph Macchio), a Jersey kid who moves with his mom to Los Angeles and learns martial arts with the help of Mr. Miyago (Pat Morita). Daniel’s new skills help him stand up to the bullying Johnny Lawrence (William Zabka) and his toadies at the Cobra Kai dojo.
Netflix begins airing the final Cobra Kai episodes today, ending a breathtaking six-season run that has included Daniel and Johnny facing off, becoming friends, and fighting to save their oft-threatened alliance. To mark the occasion, we talked with Hurwitz, Schlossberg and Heald about the decades-long origin story of one of the most successful and beloved shows on Netflix — and reinvigorating the Karate Kid universe.
By the time they had crane-kicked their way through the doors to the franchise, there was never any question that they would lead Cobra Kai. But they did a lot of work to get there.
Cobra Kai Origins
Hurwitz and Schlossberg had started writing together in college, and got enough traction from their first spec script, an R-rated comedy called Filthy, to move to Hollywood after graduation. It was the early 2000s, and Heald was living in San Francisco, working as a management consultant, and occasionally visiting his friends Hurwitz and Schlossberg.
“There was a lot of eating burgers and staying up late and talking about comedy. And that really fit where I wanted to be at 22, 23 years old, more than making financial models for some large computer chip company,” says Heald.
So he moved south, to the West Hollywood area, around the corner from Hurwitz and Schossberg. He got a job doing coverage for different studios, while working on his own pilots. Hurwitz and Schlossberg, meanwhile, broke through big with their script for 2004’s Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle.
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Around that same time, as Hurwitz remembers it, they happened to watch a new DVD release of The Karate Kid.
“We would write by day, hang out at night,” Hurwitz recalls. “And we were watching the 20th Anniversary Edition DVD for Karate Kid, and in the special features, Billy Zabka was talking about his approach to Johnny Lawrence. And in his mind, he was not the villain of the movie. He was just another teenager. He was just another kid going through high school. He had a girl that he was in love with. He was going to try to make it work. And then this guy came to town and sort of got in the way of his plans.”
As they gained more clout in the industry, the three never let go of the idea that Johnny might not be such a bad guy.
Hurwitz and Schlossberg were invited to direct their script for the Harold and Kumar sequel, 2008’s Harold & Kumar Escape From Guantanamo Bay, and went on to write and direct the 2012 American Pie sequel American Reunion. Heald, meanwhile, broke out as a co-writer of the ‘80s nostalgia masterwork Hot Tub Time Machine, released in 2010, and writer of the 2015 sequel Hot Tub Time Machine 2. (The first of the films featured Zabka.) Hurwitz, Schlossberg and Heald also collaborated on a competitive–eating script that added to their industry heat.
It was finally time to seek justice for Johnny Lawrence.
“We kind of all came up for air at the same time as streaming started to become a big thing. And we started seeing billboards for Stranger Things, which was this big ‘80s nostalgia play that was doing well, and Fuller House, which had billboards with Kimmy Gibbler on them,” recalls Hurwitz.
Gibbler, of course, is the best friend of D.J. on Full House.
“We were like, ‘If Kimmy Gibbler could be on a billboard, then Billy Zabka and Ralph Macchio could be on billboards,’” Hurwitz adds.
The trio had initially imagined a new Karate Kid movie about a grown-up Daniel and Johnny, but soon saw the possibility of a series. Looking back at the original Karate Kid and the two sequels with Macchio, they found a lot to explore.
“There were these father-son relationships, found family, bullying, the underdog story, overcoming adversity, being the new kid, fish out of water — all these universal themes that were not tied to 1984,” says Heald. “They were themes that kids and adults still go through. So we started thinking, ‘What’s different about the present day?’ And that led us down the path of bullying that takes on different forms. Now you have cyber bullying. It’s not just, ‘Meet me outside at the flagpole at 12.’”
Legacy
But before they went too far with their idea, they set out to figure out who controlled the rights to The Karate Kid. They got in touch with Will and Jada Pinkett Smith’s team, since they were among the producers of the fifth Karate Kid film, the 2010 iteration starring their son, Jaden Smith, and action icon Jackie Chan, who takes on the mentor role filled by Mr. Miyagi in the original trilogy.
Soon they connected with Caleeb Pinkett, Pinkett Smith’s brother and an actor-producer, who would become an executive producer on Cobra Kai. They also got the blessing of the estate of Jerry Weintraub, producer of all five Karate Kid films — including the fourth in the series, 1994’s The Next Karate Kid, starring Hilary Swank. And they befriended Robert Mark Kamen, who wrote all the Karate Kid films except the fourth.
They also went to Sony, which had released the films.
“They said, ‘Go get those two guys, because this whole thing seems to hinge on Ralph and Billy,’” Heald recalls.
He was friends with Zabka by this point, thanks to their Hot Tub Time Machine connection. But Macchio, he says, “was a tougher nut to crack.”
“We had to make that relationship, and we had to earn his trust,” Heald says. “This was a franchise that he’s forever tied to. You see him on the street, and he looks like Daniel LaRusso. And we were strangers. We’re not complete outsiders to the industry, obviously. He knew our work. But it’s one thing to know Harold & Kumar and Hot Tub Time Machine. It’s another thing to say those guys are now going to take the mantle of steering the Karate Kid franchise.”
In a series of meetings, starting with a four-hour lunch in New York City, they stressed to Macchio that “what’s important to us is not writing gross-out or R-rated or extreme comedy. What’s important to us is writing story. … We’re character focused. We’re story focused,” Heald says. “And this is a franchise that’s the most meaningful franchise to the three of us.”
By now, there was no question that the three of them would be the showrunners of Cobra Kai.
“We were in the right part of our careers, and we had a clear vision that we really wanted to see on the screen, that came through from those earliest pitches and from the earliest scripts, that made it undeniable,” says Heald. “The studio asked very early on, ‘Oh, who’s going to show run this?’ We said, ‘We are.’ They said, ‘Yeah, that makes sense.’”
“The main reason why we’re showrunners is because we don’t want there to be some other person that has creative authority above us,” Schlossberg explains. “We’re OK if there’s people that have financial concerns above us, but when it comes to what’s going to be on the screen, what the story is, and all of that, that’s something that, coming into Cobra Kai, we had experience with already.”
Their position has required both creative and business acumen: Cobra Kai aired on YouTube for its first two seasons, then moved to Netflix for its third when YouTube backed away from original programming. On Netflix, the show exploded in popularity.
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One key decision, early on, was not to coast on nostalgia. The showrunners took inspiration from the acclaimed dramas that came out in the years before they created Cobra Kai, including Breaking Bad and Friday Night Lights. Cobra Kai has had some fairly intense plotlines involving school violence, serious injuries, and even a POW camp.
But it never loses a sense of fun.
“The joke for us is that we’re taking Johnny Lawrence, who was just like this asshole from the ’80s, and we’re gonna make you really invested in his story. Part of the comedy is the fact that you cry when watching the show, because you’re so invested in what happened to Johnny Lawrence and his life right now,” says Hurwitz.
“It was the first time that we wrote anything that the goal wasn’t the joke,” adds Schlossberg. “There was never a scene in Harold & Kumar or Hot Tub Time Machine where we weren’t ending a scene with a button — everything was like, ‘How do you make an audience laugh as much as possible?’
“And immediately, from the very first script of Cobra Kai, we were like, ‘That’s not what this show is. There’s a meta comedy going on here. The comedy is that this is a soap opera.’”
The Karate Kid Saga Continues
The Karate Kid saga will continue long after Cobra Kai ends this year. Hurwitz, Schlossberg and Heald are collaborating on a Mr. Miyagi origin story with Kamen, and a separate project, Karate Kid: Legends, will pair Macchio and Jackie Chan.
They are revisiting other ‘80s IP as well: The showrunners are producing a Ferris Bueller’s Day Off spinoff, Sam and Victor’s Day Off, about the valets seen briefly joyriding in Bueller. And Cobra Kai probably won’t be their last show: They recently signed a deal with Sony Pictures Television.
The final Cobra Kai episodes are now streaming on Netflix.
Main image: (L to R) Cobra Kai executive producers Hayden Schlossberg, Josh Heald and Jon Hurwitz. Photo credit: Curtis Bonds Baker/Netflix © 2024