SPOILERS ahead for Karate Kid: Legends, now playing in theaters.
Karate Kid: Legends has been high on my list when it comes to 2025 movie releases, but since I first heard about it, I’ve been curious about how it may or may not affect things after the Cobra Kai finale earlier this year. Now that it’s in theaters (with its own popcorn bucket too), I can officially confirm that it doesn’t conflict with or really reference Cobra Kai… that is, until Ralph Macchio and William Zabka show off their amazing chemistry as Daniel and Johnny during the post-credits scene!
After six seasons of Cobra Kai, I think Karate Kid: Legends made the right decision to not get into the series’ lore. I loved seeing Macchio interact with Jackie Chan’s Mr. Han – who told us he still does his own stunts, by the way. But I was also totally geeking out when Zabka showed up at the end to give the best dad joke. He suggested Daniel Russo open a pizza place called “Miyagi Dough”, and it had me wondering if the reason there’s a pizza place in Legends at all was for that joke. Here’s how Jonathan Entwistle responded:
No, it's not. You know, a lot of that sequence was fully improvised, so we were just like, ‘Let's just go.’ We had the Miyagi house, we had the cast, and we were just like, ‘OK, let's just film some great jokes.’ And I was like, ‘Come on guys, I really need a zinger for the final line of the movie. Let's go.; So we were just like throwing all these things around and obviously there's a rapport, so it really worked well.
There you have it! The joke is so funny that I wouldn’t have blamed the production if ig inspired the whole plotline regarding Ben Wang’s Li Fong forming a relationship with a family-owned New York pizza place. However, Entwistle said the joke came out of some quality time between Macchio and Zabka when they went ahead and filmed the scene between the two of them.
As the director shared, when he put them together for the scene where Macchio receives a pizza from the other side of the U.S., he didn’t even know exactly what the two would say to each other, but was looking for a “zinger” to end the movie on. Those two definitely delivered! Get it… delivered? And the post-credits scene definitely feels like a nice little nod to Cobra Kai fans, who have been tuning into the Karate Kid spinoff for years, but have never seen the original fighters from the first of the Karate Kid movies on the big screen since then.
It’s a fun little moment that gives fans a little taste of the pair’s chemistry, especially after the finale of Cobra Kai finally had them becoming friends rather than having yet another rematch. Aside from that, it feels like the ending decides to keep things light and open-ended for both Ben Wang’s Li Fong, Daniel and Johnny and Jackie Chan’s Mr. Han without specifically teasing anything.
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