Spoiler alert for “Karate Kid: Legends.”
Here’s Johnny!
The newest movie in the “Karate Kid” franchise, “Karate Kid: Legends,” initially seemed like it was leaving Johnny Lawrence (William Zabka) by the wayside.
However, by the end of the movie, Zabka shows up for a cameo.
“It was really great fun shooting that scene,” director Jonathan Entwistle, 41, exclusively told The Post.
“Karate Kid: Legends” (now in theaters) follows a new character, Li (Ben Wang), who has trained in Kung Fu with revered martial arts master Mr. Han (Jackie Chan). When his mom moves him from China to New York, he befriends local Pizzeria owner Victor (Joshua Jackson) and crushes on Victor’s teen daughter, Mia (Sadie Stanley).
When Li finds himself in a karate tournament, facing off against Mia’s aggressive ex-boyfriend Connor (Aramis Knight), Mr. Han comes to help, and also entreats original “Karate Kid” Daniel LaRusso (Ralph Macchio) to help train Li.
In the final scene, the movie catches up with Daniel, who returns home to California to the late Mr. Miyagi’s old karate dojo.
The camera pans out to show that Daniel’s former bully and now friend, Johnny, is there too, dreaming up a business idea of opening a pizza restaurant together called Miyagi-Dough.
When asked if Johnny riffing about the pizza restaurant was scripted or ad-libbed, Entwistle explained: “It was a little bit of both.”
“To have them both back together in that location was really, really fun,” he said of Zabka, 59, and Macchio, 63. “They obviously have a rapport together from all of the years of working…we knew the concepts of what we wanted to do with the pizza and we just kind of let Billy go.”
“He loves that, he stepped right up into it.”
Although Daniel and Johnny were enemies in the original 1984 movie, the Netflix series “Cobra Kai” (which ran for six seasons from 2018 to 2025) revisited the characters as adults, redeemed Johnny, and ended with the two men as friends.
Shooting that scene took “maybe an afternoon” to film, Entwistle told The Post. “We got to play around in the old Miyagi house and it was great.”
He clarified that they built a “recreation” of the house from the original movies, since he said it burnt down.
Zabka’s “Karate Kid: Legends” cameo was “always planned,” he added. “I think once we knew that ‘Cobra Kai’ was coming to an end, it was just a nice moment to round out that period for the fans. So it was just very nice to just give everybody a moment to round that out.”
“Karate Kid: Legends” is now in theaters.
