When The Karate Kid was released in 1984, the movie became a surprise sensation on a very limited budget. The kind of movie that generations of young people could invest in, there was something special about seeing an ordinary kid sticking up for himself against a squad of bullies through hard work and training. In the years after that movie was released, several sequels were produced but none of them managed to truly recreate the magic of the original movie.
Even though little in known about how much Ralph Macchio was paid for the first Karate Kid film, it did make him a star. Once he was famous, Macchio did some fascinating things before he ultimately faded from the spotlight. However, that changed once the Karate Kid franchise continued with the show Cobra Kai which currently can be watched on Netflix. Even though Cobra Kai definitely has been a hit for the streaming service, many of its fans came to belived the show had been canceled for an interesting reason.
How Netflix Took Over The Entertainment Industry
When Netflix started as a service that mailed DVDs to its customers, nobody had any idea that the company would go on to change the entertainment industry as a whole. After all, Netflix was the first streaming service that truly proved that customers would pay to watch their favorite shows and movies over the internet. As it turned out, in order to attract lots of customers, however, Netflix needed to give them a special reason to use their streaming services.
By the time Netflix became a streaming service, lots of people had spent years accumulating physical copies of their favorite movies and TV shows. As a result, Netflix needed to offer their potential customers something they couldn’t get anywhere else if they wanted to attract millions of viewers. In early-2013, the company pulled that off when House of Cards was released and became the first Netflix Original that was a huge success.
Since Netflix had its first success with original programming, the streaming service has produced so many movies and TV shows that the list feels endless. For example, Stranger Things only exists in its current form since Netflix agreed to finance the show while also giving its creative team the freedom to tell their own story.
In an interesting twist, Cobra Kai arguably is the ultimate piece of Netflix programming. After all, it is a show that originally was produced and streamed on YouTube and then Netflix bought the rights to be its sole home. As a result, Cobra Kai combines Netflix’s history of buying the rights to stream content with the company’s ability to tell new stories since the streaming giant has taken over the show’s production.
Was Cobra Kai Canceled?
Thanks to the fact that there are millions of people who care deeply about their favorite movies and TV shows, reporting about the top entertainment news has become a major business. In ideal cases, entertainment reporters are reliable as they have connections in the business that give them information that otherwise is unknown.
In this day and age, some average people who have no connections in the entertainment industry still think they can be entertainment reporters as well. In those cases, people look at whatever information they can find online and then draw conclusions that likely don’t stem from reality but write about them as if they do. As a result, every major film franchise and popular TV show is the subject of a slew of mostly untrue rumors. For a perfect example of that scenario playing out, it is interesting to look at why some people thought Cobra Kai was being canceled.
In February of 2021, many Facebook users were shocked to see an ad emblazoned with the words “Netflix Cancellations: Effective Immediately”. The main reason for that is the image that appeared in the ad alongside those words was from the popular show Cobra Kai. Based on that image alone, some people concluded that Cobra Kai had been canceled and they began lamenting the supposed turn of events on social media. Unsurprisingly, when one person erroneously posts something on social media, it gets read by their followers and some of them take the claim at face value.
Anyone who actually followed the aforementioned Facebook ad quickly found out that the image included was nothing more than clickbait. The reason for that is the article they were transferred to featured a list of all the Netflix shows that were canceled and renewed. In the article, it was correctly reported that instead of being canceled, Cobra Kai actually had been renewed for a fourth season. Thankfully, it didn’t take long for the people who thought that Cobra Kai had been canceled to learn the truth once people began to respond to their social media posts with corrections.
