‘Karate Kid: Legends' Director Jonathan Entwistle on Navigating ‘Cobra Kai' and the Test Screening-Inspired Epilogue

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On the heels of Cobra Kai's 65-episode run, Karate Kid: Legends director Jonathan Entwistle strived to restore the cinematic identity of the beloved franchise.
The British filmmaker — who's most known for helming idiosyncratic streaming series such as End of the F***ing World and I Am Not Okay With This — designed his feature directorial debut to unite Karate Kid and Cobra Kai fans from every generation. That included those viewers who were raised on Jackie Chan's 2010 standalone remake of The Karate Kid. To pull off this creative merger, Entwistle and screenwriter Rob Lieber realized that they could utilize the Miyagi family dojo scene from John G. Avildsen's The Karate Kid Part II (1986) to connect Chan's story with the Ralph Macchio and Pat Morita-led mothership franchise.
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The Part II scene established that 400 years earlier, Mr. Miyagi's (Morita) ancestor, Shimpo Miyagi, spent some time in China before returning home to Okinawa, Japan. The Karate Kid: Legends brain trust then used animation to flesh out how Shimpo was taken in by Mr. Han's (Chan) forebears and taught kung fu. He then founded Miyagi-Do Karate to combine both families' unique martial arts, creating a familial friendship that endured all the way through Mr. Han and Mr. Miyagi.
Entwistle unearthed a great deal of Karate Kid Part II footage to make sure he left no stone unturned in uniting and retconning the franchise.
'[The Part II] piece had been the inspiration for the entirely different team back in 2010. They crafted that movie's concept using this beat or this notion of the Hans and the Miyagis,' Entwistle tells The Hollywood Reporter in support of Karate Kid: Legends' May 30 theatrical release. 'So we went back into the vault and into the archives to find all the scraps of film from that [Karate Kid Part II] sequence.'
Entwistle's film is set three years after the events of the franchise's hit Netflix series, Cobra Kai, as Chan's Mr. Han asks Macchio's original 'Karate Kid,' Daniel LaRusso, to help train his great-nephew, Li Fong (Ben Wang), for a New York City-set karate tournament. However, the film was originally going to hit theaters before the show's February 2025 series finale. Thus, Macchio soon became adamant that the film should delay itself for the sake of the Cobra Kai audience, and Entwistle is ultimately glad that the studio didn't risk any confusion.
'We are not a Cobra Kai movie in any way, shape, or form, and that was never the intention. Cobra Kai is so important within the overall gamut that it was only right to let it have its absolute air to breathe,' Entwistle says. 'I saw no point in confusing [the audience] with a Karate Kid movie that sits right next to the end of Cobra Kai. So it was really, really good, certainly as a Cobra Kai fan, that it had its moment and was allowed to finish. And now it's like, 'Hey guys, we've got a different story over here. Let's just keep going.''
One of the franchise's many hallmarks is that most of the films conclude on a triumphant freeze frame. Entwistle's film does in fact have one as well, but test screenings prompted him to add an epilogue, one that includes a surprise cameo that is discussed later on in this interview's brief spoiler section.
'The movie ended, solidly ended, on a freeze frame for such a long time until we started to preview it and realized that people wanted a flavor of, 'Well, where's Jackie? Where is everybody?'' Entwistle shares. 'But we still wanted to maintain the ending with the freeze frame. And it indeed remains in the movie, albeit with the logo that plays afterwards [until the coda].'
Below, during a recent conversation with THR, Entwistle also discusses the tall order of casting a Peter Parker or Miles Morales-like Li Fong.
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How did the guy behind pitch black comedy series like and end up making a movie?
It was me following a dream to make a real theatrical motion picture. That should really be every director's end goal. I was enticed by the idea of being able to make a big theatrical movie and bringing my tone, my craft and my team. I had my cinematographer [Justin Brown] and production designer [Maya Sigel] from all of my shows, and I was actually very excited to bring the martial arts element back to the big screen. I saw this as a really fun opportunity to do some fights and do some action in a different way than you normally see delivered in this type of movie.
When you signed on, were Ralph Macchio and Jackie Chan on board already? Or were there still some details to hammer out?
Yeah, at the time when I came on board, it was the how. We knew that we really wanted to try and find a way to turn the spotlight back to the theatrical versions of what this story was, specifically with Columbia Pictures. So it was a case of, 'Well, what's a cool way to be able to do this? How can we play with that and actually still tell a new chapter in the story or a new graphic novel in the sequence?'
And when was it realized that 's Miyagi family dojo scene could be retconned in order to fold Jackie Chan's 2010 standalone reboot into the mothership?
It was when we realized that [the Part II] piece had been the inspiration for the entirely different team back in 2010. They crafted that movie's concept using this beat or this notion of the Hans and the Miyagis. So we went back into the vault and into the archives to find all the scraps of film from that [The Karate Kid Part II] sequence. There were so many different iterations. There were pieces of a Blu-ray and some television versions that had been scanned at some point. So there were all these different kinds of pieces of how the movie was made, and it was fun to be able to put all that together.
takes place three years after 's series finale, but was anything off limits with regard to ? For example, if your movie wanted to use Cobra Kai for the villain's dojo, would that have caused all sorts of problems?
We could use anything that's in the movies. We could have used and touched on any concept that was in the original movies. So we could always use Daniel and Miyagi, but any elements that are Cobra Kai-specific are not a Columbia Pictures property.
So you could've gone with Cobra Kai for the villain's dojo, but would that East Coast expansion have required too much exposition?
Yeah, I think so, for sure. Cobra Kai had also ended its run, and we knew very much that we were in tandem with the end of that piece. Cobra Kai is Johnny Lawrence's story, which is one of the things that makes it so fun and so good. And that having wrapped up, I was just like, 'Well, that exists. I have that show. It's there. I can always watch it.' And then I was like, 'Let's just keep going with another novel in the long sequence.' That allowed us to connect back to the big screen after living on television for a very, very long time. I was like, 'What's a 90-minute version of this story that we can do on the big screen for all the audiences?' There's really three audiences: the Karate Kid audience, the Cobra Kai audience and the moviegoing audience, which is actually a huge, huge piece. So it was very important for me to be audience-first and make this a great experience in the theater.
I enjoyed the show, don't get me wrong, but I definitely missed the cinematic flourishes of the films. That cliffside helicopter shot in is one of the most beautiful shots ever put to screen, and then there's the indelible Bill Conti score. So it sounds like you were glad to bring some of those qualities back.
A hundred percent. I wanted all the elements to not just feel theatrical, but also cinematic, and we got that opportunity to do that. We built lots of sets. The large pieces of New York are set builds, such as the pizza shop and the neighboring alleyway. We had a classical approach to the filmmaking, and I wanted New York to feel like a cozy movie New York. That's very much a filmic approach where you don't need to bother with the specifics. We're not running around on location just shooting things; we're crafting everything.
The same goes for the music. We wanted to make sure that the music was score-based and bespoke. I firmly believe that television should consist of tracks, and movies should be score. A lot of the things that feel like tracks in this movie are actually score, and it was really key to me to blend themes with the original Conti orchestral approach. We recorded in Burbank with a full orchestra, which is a filmic approach to finishing the movie. So there was an overall analog approach to the fight sequences, the set builds, the cinematography and the color palette. It was all crafted with an eye toward revitalizing the franchise cinematically.
's final season and filmed at roughly the same time, so I figured that you killed two birds with one stone and shot the Miyagi house scenes on the show's Atlanta set. But you actually built your own set in Montreal?
Yeah, we rebuilt the Miyagi house in Montreal. [Cobra Kai] was shooting at the same time, and their [Miyagi house] is a Cobra Kai set. For the motion picture, we went back to the original version of Miyagi's house [in The Karate Kid] and where it would be today. Sadly, the original house [in Canoga Park] is now gone. It was lost in a fire.
[The next question contains spoilers for ' mid-credit scene.]
The Miyagi house-set coda featuring Daniel LaRusso (Ralph Macchio) and Johnny Lawrence (William 'Billy' Zabka) is why I initially assumed you utilized 's infrastructure. How did that cameo come together?
It was just the perfect way to round everything out. It became quite clear that we were putting all of the pieces together and that Cobra Kai would have ended by the time audiences see this. And like I said, that's Johnny's story. So to bring the two of them together to round that out just felt really perfect. Billy came [to set], and a lot of it was improv. A lot of that was just Ralph and Billy. After so many years of working together, they could just do their thing together. So we just wanted to capture that, and we wanted to put that at the end of the movie. This is by no means the end of Daniel LaRusso's story at all. But this movie was an opportunity to round out that piece and to physically hand over something from Daniel to Li Fong, but also Ralph to Ben [Wang]. They had a real relationship that I think was very, very sweet. So shooting those guys in the original Miyagi house, albeit the rebuilt version, was really quite special.
[Spoiler talk for ' has now concluded.]
The original plan was to release in 2024 for the 40th anniversary of , but the strikes got in the way. Ralph then felt passionately about it releasing after 's February 2025 finale, especially since takes place three years later. Do you like where you ultimately ended up, release date-wise?
I think it's very important to piece out the stories in the correct way. We are not a Cobra Kai movie in any way, shape, or form, and that was never the intention. Cobra Kai is so important within the overall gamut that it was only right to let it have its absolute air to breathe. So I saw no point in confusing [the audience] with a Karate Kid movie that sits right next to the end of Cobra Kai. So it was really, really good, certainly as a Cobra Kai fan, that it had its moment and was allowed to finish. And now it's like, 'Hey guys, we've got a different story over here. Let's just keep going.' It's nothing but a positive addition to the overall world.
Ben Wang's casting feels like a needle in a haystack, and as one of your producers said, he really does have a Michael J. Fox quality about him. You apparently auditioned 10,000 candidates for the role of Li Fong. Were you looking more for actors who you could teach kung fu? Or martial artists who you could train to act?
I was looking for the person who could do it all. We needed a native Mandarin speaker and someone who understood what it was to live in America, but also someone who was a fantastic actor and could do the martial arts. For me, the Li character was very much a Peter Parker or Miles Morales-like character. So that was really important for me, both in terms of the martial arts and the tone of the performance. And when I first saw Ben, I was like, 'Well, there's a Marty McFly.' I joke that I wanted Morty from Rick and Morty in the way that he is like Michael J. Fox.
So Ben had what I was looking for in an actor, but the martial arts element of the movie was so important that I just wanted to make sure that we were actually able to do real in-camera stuff. So the guy had to be able to do it himself, and there was no question about that. Much to the studio's annoyance, I was forever saying, 'The guy's got to be able to fight.' And so when I saw Ben, I was like, 'Please be able to do the martial arts.' He'd been in Destin's [Daniel Cretton] show, American Born Chinese, and once I saw the tapes, I was like, 'Okay, this is great.' He then got trained 24/7. We started to work with the stunt team and with Jackie's team, and it was next level. Ben does a huge percentage of the stunts himself, and you can see that in the movie
The dragon kick is the crane kick of this movie. Who decides what that signature move of the movie is going to be?
Weirdly, it was led by the approach to the fights. I wanted to make sure that they felt real and in your face with as much physical contact as possible. So our wonderful stunt coordinator, Peng Zhang, went out and found this fantastic kid, A.J., who could do the move he was looking for without any wires or VFX. He wanted someone who could do it from scratch so that we could shoot it and choreograph around it. We were like, 'For a kid who knows kung fu, what would that move look like when blended with karate?' So we worked backwards to where it became the dragon kick that Li's brother could do [but he couldn't].
Mr. Han and Daniel LaRusso aren't the only legends in this movie. ' Charlie Conway is also in the mix. That said, seeing Joshua Jackson play a dad to a teenage daughter (Sadie Stanley) and be described as 'old' caused me to have an existential crisis. Can you believe that this much time has passed to where Josh is now playing an 'old' dad?
(Laughs.) No, I grew up with Dawson's Creek, and I'm a huge, huge fan. [Writer's Note: Entwistle also has a Mighty Ducks jersey hanging in his office.] Josh was probably most annoyed by the number of times I quoted Dawson's Creek to him whilst we were shooting. So he's very well-versed in that, and he's absolutely wonderful in the movie. He really committed to the fight sequences and the boxing. That is Josh. There's no stunt double in that entire sequence. He takes every single punch. He really committed because he saw how hard the kids were working in martial arts, and when Jackie Chan shows up, you take every punch you can.
So the millennial in me is enjoying the Josh renaissance, and it's been an absolute pleasure working with him on this movie. He brought a wonderful softness and a little glint in the eye to his character. He plays the man being taught by the kid [Ben Wang's Li Fong]. So he's got to be able to handle that, but he's not being taught kicks and punches. He's being taught that as a former boxer who now makes pizzas, he can still get back in the ring, and that's quite a nice sentiment.
Knowing you were making a movie, was the concluding freeze frame a prerequisite for you?
Oh, a thousand percent. The movie ended, solidly ended, on a freeze frame for such a long time until we started to preview it and realized that people wanted a flavor of, 'Well, where's Jackie? Where is everybody?' But we still wanted to maintain the ending with the freeze frame. We shot that moment knowing it would be the freeze frame, and we did all of these different versions of how the freeze frame could be. Was it a still photograph that [Wyatt Oleff's] Alan takes at the end? There were all these different versions, but the freeze frame was always going to be the final moment from the get-go. And it indeed remains in the movie, albeit with the logo that plays afterwards [until the coda].
***Karate Kid: Legends is now playing in movie theaters nationwide.
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