'Karate Kid: Legends' director talks Johnny Lawrence cameo
Spoiler alert for 'Karate Kid: Legends.'
Here's Johnny!
The newest movie in the 'Karate Kid' franchise, 'Karate Kid: Legends,' initially seemed like it was leaving Johnny Lawrence (William Zabka) by the wayside.
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However, by the end of the movie, Zabka shows up for a cameo.
'It was really great fun shooting that scene,' director Jonathan Entwistle, 41, exclusively told The Post.
7 'Karate Kid: Legends' director Jonathan Entwistle in his interview with The Post.
The New York Post
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7 William Zabka in 'Cobrai Kai' Season 6.
©Netflix/Courtesy Everett Collection
'Karate Kid: Legends' (now in theaters) follows a new character, Li (Ben Wang), who has trained in Kung Fu with revered martial arts master Mr. Han (Jackie Chan). When his mom moves him from China to New York, he befriends local Pizzeria owner Victor (Joshua Jackson) and crushes on Victor's teen daughter, Mia (Sadie Stanley).
When Li finds himself in a karate tournament, facing off against Mia's aggressive ex-boyfriend Connor (Aramis Knight), Mr. Han comes to help, and also entreats original 'Karate Kid' Daniel LaRusso (Ralph Macchio) to help train Li.
7 William Zabka in 'The Karate Kid' in 1984.
©Columbia Pictures/courtesy Ever
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In the final scene, the movie catches up with Daniel, who returns home to California to the late Mr. Miyagi's old karate dojo.
The camera pans out to show that Daniel's former bully and now friend, Johnny, is there too, dreaming up a business idea of opening a pizza restaurant together called Miyagi-Dough.
When asked if Johnny riffing about the pizza restaurant was scripted or ad-libbed, Entwistle explained: 'It was a little bit of both.'
7 William Zabka and Lewis Tan in 'Cobra Kai.'
©Netflix/Courtesy Everett Collection
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7 Jackie Chan and Ralph Macchio in 'Karate Kid: Legends.'
©Columbia Pictures/Courtesy Everett Collection
'To have them both back together in that location was really, really fun,' he said of Zabka, 59, and Macchio, 63. 'They obviously have a rapport together from all of the years of working…we knew the concepts of what we wanted to do with the pizza and we just kind of let Billy go.'
'He loves that, he stepped right up into it.'
Although Daniel and Johnny were enemies in the original 1984 movie, the Netflix series 'Cobra Kai' (which ran for six seasons from 2018 to 2025) revisited the characters as adults, redeemed Johnny, and ended with the two men as friends.
7 Jackie Chan, Ben Wang, and Ralph Macchio in 'Karate Kid: Legends.'
©Columbia Pictures/Courtesy Everett Collection
7 Ralph Macchio in 'Karate Kid: Legends.'
©Columbia Pictures/Courtesy Everett Collection
Shooting that scene took 'maybe an afternoon' to film, Entwistle told The Post. 'We got to play around in the old Miyagi house and it was great.'
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He clarified that they built a 'recreation' of the house from the original movies, since he said it burnt down.
Zabka's 'Karate Kid: Legends' cameo was 'always planned,' he added. 'I think once we knew that 'Cobra Kai' was coming to an end, it was just a nice moment to round out that period for the fans. So it was just very nice to just give everybody a moment to round that out.'
'Karate Kid: Legends' is now in theaters.
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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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