Will Cobra Kai Season 3 Happen? The Producers Weigh In On The Show’s Future
Though not confirmed yet, the producers of Cobra Kai speculate on potential story threads for season 3.
| | The first season of Cobra Kai was such a smash hit with critics and audiences that YouTube Premium quickly renewed it for a second one just a week later. Judging by the critical reception to season two so far, it stands to reason that a third season will be on the docket — despite the fact that the streaming outlet had begun reassessing its slate of scripted originals back in November, which led to several cancellations.
How do we know this? Well, for starters, the spiritual television sequel to The Karate Kid film franchise has been such a huge success for the platform. Reviewers and YouTube Premium subscribers alike have turned out in droves to watch it, with some of the former group even going so far as to suggest that both Cobra Kai and star William Zabka deserved Emmy nominations for their work in season one.
There’s also the matter of what co-creators and showrunners Josh Heald, Jon Hurwitz and Hayden Schlossberg told Den of Geek at this year’s South By Southwest Festival in Austin, Texas.
“We’ve always thought there would be several seasons,” said Hurwitz. “I think we have an endgame for where we want the story to go. Whether that’s in five, eight or 25 seasons, however, we’re not entirely sure. It all really depends on the flow of the storytelling.”
“We’ve already been brainstorming. We’d just put season two in the can and we were like, Well, okay. What do we do now?’ So we just start brainstorming for seasons three and four and all that. As we’ve been doing that, we’ve been throwing out tons of different ideas. They’re not all gonna fit, though. The same thing happened when we were writing season one.”
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Sure enough, as Hurwitz explains, Cobra Kai season one was supposed to feature a whole lot more story, as well as more callbacks to the films, but the team quickly realized “there was only so much real estate” to work with.
“As long as we’re coming up with good ideas that feel fresh, that are propelling the stories forward in an organic way, that don’t make it feel like we’re doing re-tread work, we’ll keep writing and making the show,” Hurwitz concludes.
Schlossberg takes these points a bit further, adding that “one of the reasons we conceived of this as a series was that we felt the concept lent itself easily to it. It simply provided us with a lot of opportunities for telling different stories from different points of view.”
Or, as Ralph Macchio himself puts it, “this stuff evolves.”
“Some of the younger cast members and new people that you see in season two? You still don’t know who they are. We’re still trying to crack those stories as the show goes along,” says the actor. “Oftentimes, during that process, you’ll come across ideas or situations you never would have imagined prior, and that’s all a part of this evolution. It’s so cool for us to do. It’s also fascinating, I suspect, for the younger members of the cast.”
Cobra Kai season 2 premieres Wednesday, April 24th on YouTube Premium. For more info, here’s everything we know about Cobra Kai season 2.