IT SEEMED that Cobra Kai exploded out of nowhere and zoomed up the trending lists in Netflix.
According to data provided by the streaming video platform, Cobra Kai stayed for five solid days in Netflix Philippines’ daily top ten after it premiered late last month. Among daily top ten series, the cult show sat on the list for a good two weeks.
It’s found even more success abroad.
According to Forbes, it’s on track to setting a new platform record: becoming the only show to ever remain one of the three most popular shows on Netflix for the first 25 days of its run.
Netflix, as you may know, is built on an algorithm of recommendations. Whatever you watch gets fed into the gears churning underneath its slick interface, which then calculate which content to display on your profile's home page.
Evidently, enough people clicked the Cobra Kai thumbnail to make it to the top of the charts. Not bad, considering that, marketing-wise, the show was never promoted as heavily on social media or in the press the way a Netflix Original, for example, would be.
The love for Cobra Kai grew organically.
The thing is, Cobra Kai — a modern continuation of The Karate Kid movie that came out back in 1984 — didn’t actually come out of nowhere. It’s been around for about three years already. But in 2020, it’s gone from virtual obscurity to one of the year’s biggest shows.
Well, if there’s anything we learned from The Karate Kid, it’s that everyone loves a good underdog story.
Cobra Kai stars the same two actors who faced off against each other in Karate Kid’s crane-kicking finale — our hero Daniel LaRusso, played by Ralph Macchio, and certified movie baddie Johnny Lawrence, played by Academy-nominated short film director William Zabka.
But the show is smart enough to invert the usual underdog dynamic. Macchio and Zabka, for example, are now almost forty years older. The guy we once pegged as the villain has sympathetically become the (almost) hero of Cobra Kai, carving out his own path of redemption. Meanwhile, Macchio’s Daniel LaRusso has seemingly forgotten all the lessons Mr. Miyagi taught him and become a sort of arrogant, insecure dick.
Beyond the show’s clever reversal, the series is packed with the same sports-movie warmth and humor that made the ‘80s film such a hit. While Mr. Miyagi (and actor Pat Morita) may already be long gone, his benevolent presence hovers above the series.
The show also hits a lot of emotional and thematic beats that appeal to fan beyond martial movie buffs or aging GenXers who adored the original. These themes are instrumental in luring audiences outside of its core sports movie target crowd.
It helps, too, that each episode is just a zippy half-hour long, which makes it perfect for binge watching.
Back when the show first premiered three years ago, over 5.4 million people watched the first episode. That’s blockbuster numbers right there. Its first season picked up a couple of Emmy nominations as well. All in all, not a bad turnout for a show on YouTube Red.
But it was those last two words that became the problem.
Despite the stellar reviews, Cobra Kai languished in obscurity as YouTube Red — the video platform’s big (but ultimately futile) play at becoming a streaming giant with its own roster of hit shows and movies — struggled to find paying subscribers.
The Philippines only got access to YouTube Premium (the rebranded YouTube Red) last November.
By May 2020, as YouTube began to move away from scripted content, the video sharing website dropped Cobra Kai. Deadline reported that Sony Pictures was shopping the series around, with Netflix and Hulu the two frontrunners in a bidding war to pick up the first two seasons, as well as the right to show the third season.
Netflix won, obviously. And it didn’t just bring a ready and waiting audience of millions of subscribers. It also brought its invisible AI that, for many lucky series, propels relatively obscure or forgotten shows — Cobra Kai, or the American thriller You, or even the 15-year-old Prison Break, which suddenly trended early in the pandemic — into the spotlight.
It’s this secret formula that seems to be Netflix’s crane kick — its secret weapon when it comes to helping deserving shows find the audiences they never really got the first time around.
Season 3 of Cobra Kai will arrive in 2021.
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