“I Want To Go Back Home Now”: Obliterated Opened The Door For Cobra Kai Season 6, Reveals Showrunner
Exclusive: Cobra Kai season 6 showrunner Hayden Schlossberg shares his excitement about returning to the show after making Obliterated.
Cobra Kai season 6 will bring the fan-favorite series to a close six years after The Karate Kid sequel series first arrived on YouTube Red. The show made the jump to Netflix for its third season, only growing in popularity as more viewers tuned in to see what happened to The Karate Kid’s Daniel LaRusso (Ralph Macchio) and Johnny Lawrence (William Zabka) decades after their first tournament battle. Thanks to its winning cast of new and returning players, a tone fit for a wide audience, and the right blend of action, drama, and comedy, Cobra Kai has cultivated a passionate and devoted audience.
Fans of Cobra Kai have had a long time to wait, however, as Cobra Kai season 5 dropped back in September of 2022. The gap is for good reason: Cobra Kai showrunners Hayden Schlossberg, Jon Hurwitz, and Josh Heald made Obliterated, a hard-R action comedy series that hits Netflix on November 30th. Obliterated is raunchy, unhinged, and adrenaline-fueled and, as it turns out, was the project that allowed the showrunners to approach Cobra Kai season 6 with renewed vigor. Here’s what Hayden Schlossberg had to say during a recent chat with Screen Rant:
Hayden Schlossberg: We love characters, and that’s the through line of everything. We’re working on the final season [of Cobra Kai], but everything happened at the right time because we shot seasons four and five of Cobra Kai back-to-back and we were chomping at the bit to do something different. You work on the same show… we love it but, creatively, we wanted something that was fresh. To come out of season five and work on Obliterated… we were chomping at the bit to do something new, work with new characters, new storylines, and a totally different genre–hard R and all of that–and now, finishing Obliterated, it’s like, “I kind of want to go back to Cobra Kai.”
Shooting Obliterated was like going to college and having a wild time, but then it’s like, “I want to go back home now to my family.” And so, we’re teed up to make season six as awesome as it should be, because we’re not beating a dead horse with it. For us it’s fresh because we just came off of the whole season of Obliterated, so we can’t wait to get into the characters of Cobra Kai and those storylines. It’s always the same exercise, it’s just a different type of story.
How Cobra Kai Helped Obliterated
For those who first discovered the team of Scholssberg, Hurwitz, and Heald through Cobra Kai, it may come as a surprise to learn that the showrunners were previously known for hit R-rated comedies. Josh Heald wrote Hot Tub Time Machine, and Hayden Schlossberg and J on Hurwitz created the Harold & Kumar series (and are trying to make Harold & Kumar 4 happen). Obliterated gave the filmmaking team the opportunity to iterate on their roots and feels like the pent-up comedic energy of a team that has focused on family-accessible content for years. As Schlossberg said, they were “chomping at the bit to do something different”, and in Obliterated, they succeeded.
Even as Obliterated feels like a big departure from Cobra Kai, certain similarities make it easy to imagine the filmmakers’ experience on that series having a big impact on their new action comedy. Cobra Kai boasts an ensemble cast larger than those in the past work of Schlossberg, Hurwitz, and Heald, which likely played into how well the ensemble cast of Obliterated functions. Obliterated boasts seven core cast members, but each one is given plenty of time to shine thanks to masterful balancing work by the showrunners.
Cobra Kai has also been praised for its action work, especially as seasons have gone on and cast members have become increasingly proficient with karate. Five seasons in, the showrunners have continued to develop an eye for exciting action sequences (which were also present in some of their previous films), and Obliterated stands to benefit from that experience. Though Obliterated’s stunt coordinator and military advisor did plenty of work to ensure military authenticity and craft unforgettable moments, the Cobra Kai showrunners undoubtedly brought their time on the mat to bear for their latest effort.
