‘Cobra Kai’ Creators Preview Season 3, Reveal Biggest Difference From Previous Seasons (Exclusive)

New Year’s Day will be a special day for Cobra Kai fans as Season 3 will arrive on Netflix. It’s been nearly two years since Season 2 was released on YouTube, so fans are anxious to binge Cobra Kai to kickoff 2021. PopCulture.com caught up with Cobra Kai creators Josh Heald, Jon Hurwitz and Hayden Schlossberg, who revealed the biggest difference in Season 3 from the first two seasons.

“The biggest difference about Season 3 is that we’re starting at a place where characters that are normally in scenes together are just not in scenes together because of what happened at the end of Season 2,” Heald said to PopCulture. “In the wake of what happened at the school, so many characters are going through a personal journey. It caused us to have to hp around to individual characters a lot in the first couple of episodes to really experience everybody’s reactions and response to what happened. It caused us to have more story than we ever had before.”

Season 2 ended with Miguel getting kicked off a balcony by Robby, and it led to him suffering a serious injury and being in a coma. Fans were not happy to see Miguel in a state where he may not be able to fight again, but the creators knew it needed to happen to advance the story.

“Ending Season 2 the way that we did with the tragedy of what happens to Miguel was something that we went into the Season 2 writer’s room planning,” Hurwitz said. “We took this character, who we all love and is just a good kid and watched him on this journey bullied to becoming a champion to finding himself a lot of ways and growing with Johnny in karate. At the same time, we wanted to explore the concept of sometimes you do the right thing, but it doesn’t work out for you. So how do you respond to that?

“That finale is one of our favorite episodes that we ever shot,” Hurwitz continued. “That fight scene we knew it was going to be a spectacle, that was going to be a lot of fun for a lot of it and then ends in a way that was going to be a gut punch for an audience where we all have to realize that actions have consequences.”

One of the other things fans are looking forward to in Season 3 is Daniel LaRusso (Ralph Macchio going to Japan and visiting Kumiko (Tamlyn Tomita) and Chozen (Yuji Okumoto). Both were main characters in The Karate Kid Part II and will play a big role in the third season of Cobra Kai.

“We loved Karate Kid Part II. It was a huge movie in the 1980s,” Schlossberg said. “There’s a lot of nostalgia that we have for that movie. We wanted to wait for the right time to use those characters to tell the story that we’re telling. With Yuji’s character, it allows Daniel an opportunity to think about his relationship with Johnny. …And with Kumiko, you have the story of an old flame that I think a lot of people can relate to.”