You can’t keep a good crane kick down… or off the big screen. Sony Pictures has announced that both Jackie Chan and Ralph Macchio will be returning to the Karate Kid universe (what a world we live in).
The announcement of the new film came from both Macchio and Chan, who starred in separate entries of the franchise decades apart as the titular Karate Kid and Mr. Han, respectively. It isn’t clear what roles each actor will be playing, but the studio is describing the film as “the fusing and continuing of the mythology of the original franchise,” according to THR, which definitely makes it sound like Macchio will at least be playing the same Daniel LaRusso he has played in Cobra Kai and that this will be a continuation of the “Miyagiverse” spawned on that show.
For Chan, whose 2010 reboot of Karate Kid has never been firmly established as canon, it’s harder to say if he’ll play karate master Mr. Han again. The new film is said to be about a Chinese teen who moves to the East Coast of the USA and finds strength in training with an old karate instructor, sort of reversing the plot of both the original film and the reboot. Regardless, the search is on for that kid, as Maccio and Chan reveal in the video below.
Jonathan Entwistle, who is no stranger to teen angst, thanks to his work on I’m Not Okay with This and The End of the F***ing World, is directing the film with a screenplay by Rob Lieber (Peter Rabbit, Disney’s Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good Very Bad Day).
With Cobra Kai ending next year with its sixth season, Sony is looking to keep the Karate Kid hype alive by shooting the movie next spring and setting a release date of Dec. 13, 2024. That shouldn’t be too hard to hit, given the smaller scale and budget of the movies, but what will be hard to capture is the magic that Cobra Kai effortlessly infused into the franchise, combining true pathos with campy ’80s karate action. That’s no easy feat, so it will be interesting to see if Entwistle delivers.
