Why Cobra Kai's Final Season Is Split Into Three Parts

There is no more waiting in this dojo, because "Cobra Kai" is finally back. The popular legacy sequel series that started its life on the YouTube Red streaming platform is ending its run after six seasons with an epic worldwide tournament that brings the best of the best in karate to prove who is the best around once and for all. Of course, we know this is not exactly the end as there will be a movie coming out in 2025 that brings together both franchise mainstay Ralph Macchio and Jackie Chan from the 2010 remake of "The Karate Kid." 

For now, "Cobra Kai" is doing its final bow with a season split into three parts. The first part is coming to Netflix on July 18, 2024, while Part 2 releases on November 24, 2024. After that, Part 3 will bring the story to an end sometime in 2025. It would be easy to blame the split on Netflix wanting to stretch out the show's popularity, but in reality, it was a gift from the "Cobra Kai" creators not to have fans wait too long in between episodes.

Speaking with io9, show creators Hayden Schlossberg, Josh Heald, and Jon Hurwitz explained the decision to split the final season into three parts:

"We knew we were coming in for a landing, but we felt like 10 episodes wasn't enough to wind up all the stories the way we wanted to. And 20 episodes felt like too much." Hurwitz said. "We all landed on 15. And once we landed on 15, we were thinking, 'How do we want that to come out?' Because we wanted people to get episodes of the show sooner rather than later [instead of] waiting even longer for the show because it's been a while since we've been out."

Indeed, one of the many changes streaming has brought to TV is the long waiting times in between seasons. We are now used to waiting at least a year, if not several years for new episodes of a show, often due to VFX, actors' schedules, and the like.  Season 5 of Cobra Kai came out in September 2022, so it's been a good while since last we saw these characters — though at least it's not been as long as the wait between seasons of "Stranger Things."

According to Hurwitz, the creative team used to write each 10-episode season in batches of five, splitting the season in half and dealing with the first five episodes before handling the latter five. Here's how explained it to io9:

"This season, it was like, 'Okay, well, three chunks of five would make sense.' It's almost like three acts in a bigger story. And that's just something that we decided to do creatively. And when we talked about that with Netflix, they loved the idea of the three drops. And that's where it came from. So we've known this for a very long time. And it is all by design."

This is actually a pretty good idea, even if it feels like spreading the season too much. Plus, it's nice to have confirmation that Part 3 is not a movie, or a single, longer episode — but five.

Part 1 arrives on Netflix beginning on July 18, 2024.