‘Cobra Kai’ Creators On The Future Of The Series: “Season 4 is Not the Conclusion of the ‘Cobra Kai’ Story”

Spoilers ahead for the third season of Netflix’s Cobra Kai.

My favorite pop culture trope is when hostile adversaries are forced to form an uneasy alliance in order to vanquish an even stronger threat. This trope was repeatedly used on Lost, the last few Fast and Furious films, and, of course, the hit 1987 comedy Ernest Goes to Camp. The old “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” maneuver is a timeless classic, and the trope was utilized to perfection during the season finale of Netflix’s Cobra Kai.

After Sensei Kreese’s (Martin Kove) increasingly sinister Cobra Kai incite yet another youth karate brawl (this one is Christmas themed!), longtime rivals Johnny Lawrence (William Zabka) and Daniel LaRusso (Ralph Macchio) decide to put their personal animosity aside and combine dojos to eliminate the threat of Cobra Kai once and for all. The longstanding feud will, presumably, be settled in Season 4, and in typical Karate Kid fashion the battle for the heart and soul of youth karate in and around the San Fernando Valley area will happen at the All-Valley Tournament.

“Why don’t we settle this the old-fashioned way?” a bloodied Kreese asks Johnny and Daniel during the final moments of Season 3. “Tournament. If we lose, I go. If you lose…”

“We won’t lose,” Johnny says, interrupting his former sensei.

Moments later we see Johnny’s dojo, Eagle Fang Karate, and Daniel’s dojo, Miyagi-Do Karate, unite as The Protomen’s version of “In the Air Tonight” ominously scores this franchise-altering moment.

As a longtime Karate Kid fan, my first thought was simply: WOW. It’s a perfect scene and a truly iconic television moment. My second thought had to do with how this story would affect the series going forward. The show was renewed for a fourth season back in October of 2020, but Netflix isn’t exactly in the habit of extending shows beyond Season 4. Plus, the (potential) culmination of the Johnny/Daniel/Kreese conflict seems like a natural ending point for this iteration of Cobra Kai. As someone who loves the show, I was worried the writers were positioning the upcoming fourth season as the final installment of the show. In search of answers, Decider asked the Cobra Kai creators, Jon Hurwitz, Josh Heald, and Hayden Schlossberg, if they were approaching Season 4 as the final chapter of the series.

“Season 4 is not the conclusion of the Cobra Kai story,” they said. “There are still many twists and turns and crowd-pleasing moments to be had before we reach the endgame that we’ve been planning since the beginning. We can’t go into too much detail about plans beyond Season 4, except to say that there is definitely a lot more story left to tell in the Karate Kid/Cobra Kai universe.”

We can now definitively say that Season 4 isn’t the endgame. Do you hear that noise? That’s the collective sigh of relief from the Cobra Kai universe. But where could the series go beyond the fourth season? If the next season sprinkles in elements of The Karate Kid III, could Season 5 borrow from The Next Karate Kid? The third season delivered franchise favorite Elisabeth Shue, so it’s not out of the realm of possibility that a fifth season of this immensely popular series could mark the Cobra Kai debut of… Hilary Swank’s Julie Pierce.

I guess it’s true what they say: Cobra Kai will never die.

The third season of Cobra Kai is available to stream on Netflix.