You did tease that spin-offs could be possible on Netflix. Have you thought about which characters you might spin off?
Hurwitz: We have put thought into spin-off ideas. We love just The Karate Kid universe, love all the characters from back in the day and we love the characters we’ve created. It’s hard for me to give you an exact answer to this, but what I can say is that we have a list of at least five different scenarios that we would pursue, that we could consider. Now, some of them are untraditional. Some of them are unlike any kind of spin-off you’ve ever seen before. But, every time we’re writing episodes of the show, we’re falling in love with the characters that we’re creating and examining characters from the past. Within the world of Cobra Kai, there are certain things that you can explore and certain things that don’t fit into that particular box, but there may be opportunities down the road to break out one of these characters and get to know them better or to explore different times in characters’ lives or what have you.
On YouTube, you really made the most of your budget every episode, every season. Now that you’re on Netflix, could season 4 have more resources for fights and other things you may not have been able to do?
Heald: We haven’t gotten into the nitty gritty of that because we haven’t needed to. We’ve always been very, very mindful of our budget and taking steps to write within our budget and stretch it as far as we can. At times in the past, that’s meant filming two units at the same time or finding ways of saving in one episode so you can go bigger in the next. We’re not trying to be the houseguests who come to Netflix and start getting too comfortable too soon in terms of, ‘Oh, that’s nice, we’re going to have that room too.’ I think if we’re fortunate to go forward more, we’re going to continue to do what we do, which is write economically and have big visions and rely on our production partners to help us bring those visions to fruition. But I can say we always want to grow the show bigger and with the amount of characters we now have in this universe, it naturally has expanded well beyond the scope of where it started back in season one.
Could Johnny and Daniel actually be friends if they just got out of their own way?
Schlossberg: I absolutely think that there is the potential for friendship between Johnny and Daniel. The question is, will there still be rivalry and ill will? Because the two things aren’t always mutually exclusive. I think in the first two seasons, you see the potential, but you also see the stumbling blocks. In some ways, that may be all it can ever be or maybe there’s a way to get over those issues. I think we certainly want them to, but we also want to be true to life and relationships. You can forgive but you really can’t forget. The past is etched in stone and what happened happened. So you can get over it, but there may still be something that lingers. We’ll see how that plays out as the show continues.