I saw a trailer for this the other day, and it seemed kind of confusing. It looks like they’re doing a sequel based around the idea that the guy who lost the tournament in the original has a crappy life, then decides to turn around his life by reopening the Cobra Kai school. From the trailer it seems like Daniel is going to be the bad guy and that it was a serious movie, but from the reviews it sounds like they’re shooting for a comedy/action movie. To me this really smells like another one of those forgettable reboots, but I was wondering what other people think:
“Straight-to-YouTube” has got to be a new low in filmmaking.
To be fair, that’s not your normal YouTube. It’s a subscription service like Hulu.
That does not look like Ralph Macchio to me.
Yeah, Youtube Red is their paid subscription service, so it’s really about the same as ‘straight to Netflix’ or ‘straight to Hulu’.
The two trailers I’ve seen for it actually look pretty good, and I wouldn’t mind watching it…
… but I’m not going to pay for yet *another *service.
Have Daniel-san and Johnny stayed in shape, or is it going to be slo-mo cuts from stuntmen like the 90’s version of “Kung Fu” ?
On YouTube Red, not to be confused with RedTube.
The trailers look intriguing and I do like the idea of flipping the protagonist and antagonist roles from the first movie while adding more layers than “Good guy with karate beats bad guy with karate.” Johnny wasn’t really a bad guy, he was a jerk at times during the movie but Daniel was a little prick too.
But like Lightnin’ said, I’m not ready to pay for another streaming service.
Why, does he look older than fifteen?
Are you kidding? It’s been a running joke for the last 30 years that the guy never ages. He looks great for his age.
Not sure how I feel about the trailer yet; I couldn’t help but think it looked like a parody, albeit a badass one. Gonna have to watch it a few more times to decide. 
That’s the rub. Too many subscription services. I have Prime and Netflix. Do I need more?
Ralph Macchio looks great. And so does Academy Award Nominee Billy Zabka. They both have the reputations of being a couple of the nicest guys to work with. I’m glad to see them getting work.
I wonder if the idea for this project came from someone who watched the sweep the leg music video, which also shows the cast from the original movie, but all grown up
If you’d continued with “How I Met Your Mother” I’d say yes. Barney had a thing where he thought Johnny Lawrence was the hero of the film, The Karate Kid. Daniel was the violent bully. They even got the original actor to do a cameo appearance.
This isn’t quite that extreme. It’s just painting them both as flawed and dealing with life and their own demons. It still sounds like they repurposed some of the Johhny isn’t a bad guy argument.
Sure, Daniel wasn’t perfect. But there’s no way Johnny was a violent sociopathic bully, at least as presented in the movie. Doesn’t mean he can’t be an interesting and sympathetic character as a grownup, but let’s not go overboard with the moral relativism.
Doesn’t look half bad. They should call it Johnny Be Good.
Macchio was in one episode, Zabka was in a couple of them.
I thought the trailer was hilarious.
“Isn’t this the guy who’s ass you kicked?”
“Well technically, I kicked him in the face”.
It always seemed a bit unrealistic to me that, in the original movie, there was this young woman actress, Elisabeth Shue, playing the part of the love interest for a kid in his early to mid-teens, until I found out that the actor Ralph Macchio was actually a couple of years older than her. In the Cobra Kai trailer he looks as if he’s in his 30s, but I checked and he’s now actually 56.
“You’re going to bring Cobra Kai back to the Valley? Not on my watch!”