No one could have guessed that when a scrawny kid from New Jersey moved to California with his mom, we’d still be talking about it four decades later. But that’s exactly what happened with The Karate Kid, the hit 1984 movie starring Ralph Macchio and Pat Morita. The inspirational sports tale spawned two sequels over the next five years and a third one five years after that. Things then went cold at the dojo for almost 15 years until Will Smith and Jada Pinkett Smith revived the franchise for their son Jaden with Jackie Chan in the mentor role.
That 2010 remake was the biggest hit of the bunch, by a significant amount, but nothing immediately came of it. Instead, fans had to wait almost another decade for the show Cobra Kai, which continued the story from the original films in a whole new format. That show became a mega hit on Netflix, and finally, in 2022, Sony Pictures announced it was bringing The Karate Kid back to the big screen, not just with Jackie Chan, but Ralph Macchio too.
Karate Kid: Legends is in theaters this weekend, and it’s a film that promises to bring together everything fans love about all iterations of The Karate Kid, all in one package. But does it? And how does it compare to the other films in the franchise? Here’s our ranking so you can find out which one is the best around.
6. The Next Karate Kid (1994)
No matter how bad you think or remember The Next Karate Kid to be, trust us. It’s worse. Eventual Oscar winner Hilary Swank stars as an awkward high school student who Mr. Miyagi attempts to teach karate to. Only, the dynamic of older man and younger woman is constantly awkward, the villains are evil without any discernible reason, and you never buy into any of it. It’s a pox on The Karate Kid franchise as a whole and should be erased from the Earth.
5. Karate Kid: Legends (2025)
What a letdown. There are many, many things wrong with Karate Kid: Legends and you can read about them all in my review here. But for the purposes of this article, the biggest thing is that it doesn’t understand what makes The Karate Kid great. It’s a franchise about underdogs. About friendship. About hard work and mentorship. Legends thinks it’s a franchise about cool fights with all the other stuff taking a back seat. There are good moments and good intentions throughout, but mostly it’s a swing and a miss.
4. The Karate Kid Part III (1989)
Part III is a movie only for the true Karate Kid fans. Which is to say, as a general movie, it’s not very good. But if you love the characters and the franchise, it’s super fun. It’s set only one year after the events of the first film, but five in real time which makes things a little wonky. Disgraced sensei John Kreese (Martin Kove) gets his super rich best friend Terry Silver (Thomas Ian Griffith) to get revenge on Mr. Miyagi and Daniel for humiliating him and Cobra Kai at the previous tournament. Only, it’s clear they deserved it since no one else returns in a meaningful way and they have to hire “Karate’s bad boy,” Mike Barnes (Sean Kanan), to fight for them. It’s silly, it doesn’t make much sense, but it’s unabashedly The Karate Kid, so we love it.
3. The Karate Kid (2010)
When I first saw the 2010 remake of The Karate Kid, I didn’t much care for it. I remember that because I hadn’t revisited it again until this week. But, once I did, I changed my tune slightly. It’s a very, very faithful remake of the original film, down to almost every single story beat. Things happen a little differently only because the son and mother here (Jaden Smith and Taraji P. Henson) move to Japan, not California, and Jaden’s character Tre is several years younger than Daniel was in the first movie. But, beyond that, it’s a film that flies by because it’s based on something that at its core, works incredibly well.
2. The Karate Kid Part II (1986)
The main fault of The Karate Kid Part II is that it’s not the first one. That’s pretty much it. Beyond that, it does everything you could want from a sequel. In the film, Mr. Miyagi and Daniel go to Miyagi’s home in Okinawa, Japan, and are sucked into a long-standing local grudge. So, it changes the setting in a logical but interesting way. Introduces bigger stakes for the characters. Loosely borrows the structure of the original film but evolves it ever so slightly. It is filled with excellent new characters, both good and bad. It even has a banger of a theme song in “The Glory of Love” by Peter Cetera.
1. The Karate Kid (1984)
Was there any doubt I was going to put the original in the top spot here? Of course not. The original Karate Kid is not only funny, emotional, and exciting, it’s way more epic than you probably remember. Daniel LaRusso truly goes on a big, formative journey throughout the movie, helped not just by the Oscar-nominated performance of Morita as Miyagi, but a stellar cast of supporting characters played by the likes of William Zabka as the villainous Johnny, Martin Kove as his evil sensai Kreese, and Elisabeth Shue as the love interest, Ali. It’s simply one of the most enjoyable (not to mention quotable) films of the entire decade.
But also … Cobra Kai
I can’t do a Karate Kid ranking without at least giving some props to Cobra Kai. Of course, a six-season TV show is going to have an edge over any two-hour movie, so putting them against each other isn’t fair. I’ve also written at length about the wonder that is Cobra Kai, a 65-episode sequel to a beloved, nostalgic franchise. So yes, it’s better than all of these movies combined, because it should be. It has more time. It understands The Karate Kid in ways that even some of the other movies don’t. It makes every single one of those movies, even the new one, better. But it’s not a movie, so it doesn’t count here.
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