The trailer for Karate Kid: Legends demonstrates some major changes in status quo for The Karate Kid franchise. Karate Kid: Legends bridges the main Karate Kid series with the 2010 remake, with Ralph Macchio’s Daniel LaRusso meeting Jackie Chan’s Mr. Han. Karate Kid: Legends will focus upon the two martial arts masters as mentors to Mr. Han’s young kung fu student Li (Ben Wang).
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Part of the franchise retcon Karate Kid: Legends makes also includes establishing Mr. Han as an old friend of Daniel’s karate mentor Mr. Miyagi (Noriyuki “Pat” Morita). While that’s a big change to align the Chan-led Karate Kid (former) remake into its namesake franchise, that’s also just one way in which Karate Kid: Legends is changing things up. Judging from the Karate Kid: Legends trailer, life is also completely different for Daniel and Mr. Han when they finally meet.
Mr. Han Now Teaches Many Kung Fu Students
The Karate Kid: Legends trailer shows Mr. Han as the sifu of a thriving school of highly skilled kung fu students. Mr. Han has also applied his unique “jacket on, jacket off” method of internalizing the techniques of kung fu to large classes, while he also has a particularly exemplary student in the young kung fu prodigy Li (Ben Wang). While Mr. Han has passed on his kung fu wisdom to presumably hundreds of students in the years since 2010’s The Karate Kid, that film also showed Mr. Han in a very different place, and climbing out of his lowest point.
The Karate Kid remake establishes Jackie Chan’s Mr. Han as a solitary maintenance man still grieving the deaths of his wife and son and living a life of isolation. His rescue of Dre Parker (Jaden Smith) changes both of their lives, with Dre instantly eager to learn kung fu and Mr. Han showing Dre the full internal and external depth of his knowledge of martial arts. In the end, Dre and Mr. Han help each other in equal measure. The Karate Kid: Legends trailer shows how much their relationship has improved Mr. Han’s life for the better, and led to Mr. Han’s kung fu philosophy and methods bringing out the potential of many young students like Dre.
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Daniel LaRusso Has Seemingly Retired From Teaching Karate
If Mr. Han is a dedicated martial arts teacher in Karate Kid: Legends, the trailer hints that Daniel LaRusso may have gone in the opposite direction. When Mr. Han pays a visit to Daniel at the Miyagi-Do dojo, the school doesn’t appear to be as full of students as it is on Cobra Kai, or even active at all. With Daniel seen alone in the Miyagi-Do dojo in the Karate Kid: Legends trailer, it could indicate that he has kept true to his promise for the Seikai Taikai tournament of Cobra Kai Season 6 to be his “karate swan song.”
That outcome is certainly a major change for Daniel from his arc on Cobra Kai, in which he takes on over two dozen students. Daniel even forms some tense but gradually stronger friendships and teaching alliances with his old nemeses Johnny Lawrence (William Zabka), Chozen Toguchi (Yuji Okumoto), and Mike Barnes (Sean Kanan). Daniel’s dedication to imparting the teachings of Mr. Miyagi to his students is something he clearly takes very seriously on Cobra Kai. Depending on how the series ends, Daniel may have decided to entrust his students with passing on the teachings of Miyagi-Do between Cobra Kai‘s ending and the beginning of Karate Kid: Legends.
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Why Daniel & Mr. Han Teaching Li Together Will Be New for Both of Them
Even with their respective expertise in martial arts and backgrounds in teaching young students, Daniel and Mr. Han’s team-up in Karate Kid: Legends will likely be a whole new learning experience for them as much as it will be for Li. To begin with, Daniel and Mr. Han will be jointly teaching an individual student with great promise, a major shift for both of them after primarily teaching either one-on-one or large groups of students. To be sure, Daniel and Mr. Han seem to have a mutual respect for one another that will likely enable them to avoid the friction of Daniel and Johnny’s partnership of rival senseis. Still, Daniel and Mr. Han sharing their knowledge with one student simultaneously is a major change for both of them, and also highlights how their own stories could likely progress.
Daniel and Mr. Han are exponents of karate and kung fu, and in teaching both to Li, they’ll each also be exposed to a different martial arts discipline, philosophy, and training methods. Compared to the rivalry being the Miyagi-Do and Cobra Kai schools of karate, Daniel and Mr. Han are both likely to approach a foreign martial art with genuine respect and, as they both put it in the trailer, “two branches, one tree.” This could be one of the big surprises in store in Karate Kid: Legends, with Daniel and Mr. Han gaining some new wisdom from the other’s martial art and adding some new techniques to their fight scenes, right alongside Li combining kung fu and karate himself. The alliance of Daniel and Mr. Han in Karate Kid: Legends exemplifies where both of their character arcs can go in The Karate Kid franchise, and that even the wisest of martial arts masters can always continue to grow.
Cobra Kai Season 6, Part 3 arrives on Netflix on February 13, 2025, and Karate Kid: Legends will be released in theaters on May 30, 2025.
