The original Karate Kid is an all-time classic. Daniel’s improbable victory against Cobra Kai is a feel-good underdog story that stands the test of time. The second movie is a fun follow-up that broadens the scope of the franchise, taking Daniel and Mr. Miyagi out of the Valley as they travel to Okinawa to say goodbye to Miyagi’s father. The reviews are mixed for The Karate Kid II, but I’ve always been a man who will fight for the film’s honor.
The Karate Kid III is… well… not good. The third installment of the franchise has a well-deserved 15% Tomatometer score, but I have a soft spot for KK3 because it introduced us to charismatic lunatic Terry Silver (played to perfection by Thomas Ian Griffith) and one of the most terrifying members of the Cobra Kai dojo: the “Bad Boy of Karate” Mike Barnes (portrayed with frightening aplomb by Sean Kanan).
Finally, there’s The Next Karate Kid, a critically reviled movie that currently sits at 7% on Rotten Tomatoes. The 1994 flick is the first in the series not to feature Ralph Macchio, with future Oscar-winner Hilary Swank playing the role of a pupil in desperate need of Mr. Miyagi’s sage guidance (Julie Pierce). I’ve covered Cobra Kai since the show’s YouTube Red days. Series creators Josh Heald, Jon Hurwitz, and Hayden Schlossberg have such a deep love and respect for the franchise and have expertly incorporated a slew of fan-favorite legacy characters into the Cobra Kai universe. I was 99% sure we’d see Julie Pierce as Cobra Kai prepared to karate kick its way into the streaming sunset.
But I was wrong. The final five episodes offered a thrilling, satisfying coda to this chapter of The Karate Kid franchise, but Julie Pierce was the one prominent legacy character not to appear in the series. Her absence wasn’t due to a lack of trying by showrunners Heald, Hurwitz, and Schlossberg. During a February Zoom interview with Decider, Hurwitz revealed that he and his fellow Cobra Kai co-creators reached out to Swank’s team before the season about a potential appearance, but it wasn’t meant to be.
“[We] never actually spoke directly with her. We wrote letters. We had some thoughts in mind as to what we would do to bring her back in,” Hurwitz told us. “We only have love for Hilary Swank. Whenever you’re making a project, people have all sorts of reasons why they will or will not be participating in something, and with the timing of whatever was going on, it just was never an option.”
So if the stars had aligned, how would Julie Pierce have fit into the overall story of Johnny and Daniel battling Silver’s Iron Dragons for global karate dominance?
“What we loved about her character, and continue to love about her character, is that she was another student of Mr. Miyagi,” Hurwitz said. “So as Daniel is going through the crisis that he’s going through all season about Mr. Miyagi, there was an opportunity for her to be somebody who may have more information about Mr. Miyagi’s past. And perhaps bring some wisdom to the Torys and Samanthas of the world as well.”
While it obviously would have been pretty damn epic to see Julie and Daniel reminisce about Mr. Miyagi, the real missed opportunity is that we never got a chance to see Swank’s Julie interact with Eli “Hawk” Moskowitz (Jacob Bertrand). Those two would have undoubtedly bonded over their shared affinity for hawks.
The final five episodes of Cobra Kai are now streaming on Netflix.