‘Cobra Kai’ Creators’ Plan Includes ‘At Least Six’ Seasons
Cobra Kai Season 4 is now available on Netflix. It’s ten episodes of intrigue, betrayal, alliances, twists, Karate Kid callbacks, and a whole lot of fighting. And of course the whole thing ends on a massive cliffhanger — which is not too shocking since Netflix has already renewed Cobra Kai for a fifth season coming in the future.
But will that be the end of Cobra Kai? Not if the series’ creators and producers Hayden Schlossberg, Jon Hurwitz, and Josh Heald have anything to say about it. In an interview with Collider, they refused to give a definitive number of seasons they expect Cobra Kai to go. But they did say they “always viewed it as at least six” seasons of a show, even from the earliest days of working on Cobra Kai, back when it was a premium offering on YouTube.
Supposedly, part of the reason they can’t give an answer to the question of how much longer Cobra Kai will last is that they themselves are not certain — and the overall concept for the show has changed over time as they have explored and introduced different characters. As Heald put it:
There are characters and storylines that we’ve considered that, from the beginning, we would have said, ‘Okay, that’s a season,’ and that storyline ended up being an episode or two. And then there’s the opposite of that where you say, ‘Okay, this is a season,’ and now we’re going to extend that into multiple seasons. So we’ve always looked back at our original plan with open eyes because with so many new branches and so many new characters and interactions and what you’re seeing during production when, ‘Oh wow, these two people together, there’s something interesting about that duo,’ you want to lean more into it and when you do lean more into it, it naturally pushes other things along and further out.
Heald, Schlossberg, and Hurwitz are currently writing Season 5 of the show and “still figuring out” what they call their “endgame plan” beyond that.
It’s hard to name Netflix shows that have lasted for six seasons, much less gone beyond that. (House of Cards hit six and ... I think that’s it?) Plus, as cleverly as Cobra Kai has mined The Karate Kid for material, at this point they’ve sort of exhausted the old characters from the franchise that could return — unless they’re going to start bringing in characters from The Next Karate Kid. But maybe they will! I never would have predicted Terry Silver would show up on the show. And now he’s Season 4’s big new villain.
All four seasons of Cobra Kai are streaming on Netflix.