Final episodes of ‘Cobra Kai’ season six to arrive sooner than expected
The history of Cobra Kai is fascinating, and not just because few people were expecting a sequel series to the original Karate Kid franchise to become one of the biggest and most popular shows on Netflix.
The first two seasons aired exclusively on YouTube’s premium service YouTube Red, before that short-lived experiment ended when the website abandoned its adventures in original programming. Sniffing opportunity in the air, Netflix swooped in and welcomed Cobra Kai into its stable of exclusive shows.
When the first two seasons were added to the content library in August 2020, it ended up as the single top-viewed series on Netflix bar none, and it’s continued on that trajectory ever since. The Karate Kid was a huge hit and the films had plenty of fans in the 1980s, but nobody could have guessed that the ongoing rivalry between Ralph Macchio’s Daniel LaRusso and William Zabka’s Johnny Lawrence would become a sensation.
In typical Netflix fashion, though, the waits have grown longer. The third season – and first made by the streamer – premiered on January 1st, 2021, with the fourth arriving 364 days later on December 31st. The fifth landed nine months after that in September 2022, but subscribers had to wait almost two years until the sixth and final season began airing on July 18th, 2024.
However, Cobra Kai has become the latest high-profile Netflix show to be split into multiple parts, with the 15-episode finale arriving in three separate instalments. Initially, Part 2 was scheduled to drop on November 25th of this year, but the platform has moved that up by ten whole days.
Part 2 will instead release on November 15th and 3am ET/12am PT on Netflix, the downside being that there’s still four months to go. Production was heavily impacted by the SAG-AFTRA strikes so at least Netflix is rolling Cobra Kai‘s swansong out in parts instead of extending the wait even longer.
If the show’s performance in terms of viewership is any indication, then all three chapters of season six are going to be smash hits in their own right. It marks the end of the line for Cobra Kai, but it’s nowhere close to being the finish line for the franchise as a whole, with Macchio set to return as LaRusso alongside Jackie Chan’s Mr. Han in a combination of legacy sequel and crossover with the Karate Kid remake, which is set to hit cinemas on May 30th, 2025.