‘Cobra Kai’: Netflix Announces Massive Viewing Numbers for Season 3

The third season of Cobra Kai was released nearly two weeks ago and has become a significant success. On Tuesday, Netflix announced the viewing numbers for The Karate Kid spinoff and is on course for more than 41 million households to have watched Season 3 in its first 28 days. Between all three seasons, 73 million households have checked out the series that stars William Zabka and Ralph Macchio.

Cobra Kai Season 3 premiered on New Year’s Day, one week earlier from what it was initially scheduled when the trailer was released in October. The first two seasons were first released on YouTube but made the move to Netflix during the summer and became an instant hit as audiences viewed 2.17 billion minutes of the show in its premiere week.

“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,” Cobra Kai co-creator and executive producer Josh Heald said to PopCulture.com before the third season was released. “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.”

Fans who saw the first two seasons on YouTube have waited a very long time for Season 3 to be released. Season 2 premiered on YouTube in April 2019, and Season 3 was filmed at the end of that year. The show was on track to be released in the spring of 2020, but YouTube decided not to stream original shows. That led to Netflix landing the rights to the show in June.

Netflix also renewed Cobra Kai for a fourth season, and production on that will likely start soon. “COVID has thrown a wrench into everyone’s plans for exactly when production begins,” Heald said. “But our expectation is in early 2021, we will be in production. We are just keeping our heads down and making sure that the story makes sense and the scripts are solid and getting our ducks in a row so the moment that everything looks good, we can begin.”