With Karate Kid: Legends struggling at the box office and a Jack Ryan flick on the way, can the film-to-TV pipeline ever reverse course?
Minor plot details of The Last Of Us, Captain America: Brave New World and Jack Ryan lie ahead.
By most box office metrics, The Karate Kid: Legends is doing fine. Produced for a modest $45m and with global receipts standing at $74m, the film will likely be in profit by the end of the month.
Not that you’d think that looking at most of its coverage. “Oh, no”, said Deadline, looking at reports of a $19-21m opening Stateside; Variety called the response “tepid”; “Karate Kid: Legends gets kicked around”, read the Hollywood Reporter headline.
Compared to early projections (the film was looking at a $35m US opening at one stage) and family-friendly mega-hits Lilo And Stitch and Mission: Impossible – Final Reckoning, what Sony has managed to eke out of its franchise’s sixth entry might disappoint. As the first film spin-off from an incredibly popular TV show, though? A $47m opening sounds like a miracle.
When YouTube (yes, YouTube) released the first season of Cobra Kai in 2018, few would have expected the “Johnny Lawrence is a good guy” premise to stretch to six seasons. YouTube certainly didn’t – it sold the show to Netflix after two. But against the odds, the underdog comedy-drama earned the rare combo of great reviews and consistently high viewing figures, introducing a new generation of younger fans in a way so many spin-offs don’t manage. 65 episodes of television later, even die-hard fans have now spent more time in Daniel LaRusso’s company on the small screen than in the cinema.
All of which puts Karate Kid: Legends in an odd place. On the one hand, it’s a sequel to the fifth-biggest US film of 1984 and one of the most iconic film franchises of the 1980s. On the other, it’s a follow-up to one of Netflix’s biggest TV shows, taking to the big screen for the first time in most of its fans’ consciousness.
Now that audiences have been trained to expect karate tournament action on the small screen, Deadline wonders, is it surprising they aren’t flocking to the cinema for what they used to get from their sofa? Is there anything Legends can offer that won’t be a repeat of 30-odd hours of television? That Sony inexplicably released the film – set three years from the end of Cobra Kai – just three months after the season six finale wrapped up the show’s loose ends, can’t have helped.
But the fact remains that our expectations of cinema releases are still far greater than those we have for TV. The perception of the big screen as a home for big-scale entertainment means we still expect bigger things – more action, more ambition, and, yes, more profits – even while streaming shows have matched or surpassed their rivals in terms of production value. Often, this can leave cinemagoers disappointed: the most recent season of The Last Of Us saw the town of Jackson fight off a zombie siege with staffed ramparts and flamethrowers, while Captain America: Brave New World struggled to authentically shoot Sam Wilson fighting a big red man in a car park. Speaking of Marvel, it’s hard to deny that the giant’s post-Covid focus on TV has devalued its big screen offering somewhat – even well-received film projects like Thunderbolts are now met with shrugs of “I’ll wait for Disney+” in a way that just wasn’t happening as recently as 2023.
It sometimes seems that our expectations for big-screen entertainment have risen alongside streaming’s ‘Golden Age’ – and there’s little room for film to meet them. The increased emphasis on large-screen formats (Sinners, Dune Part Two) and audience interaction (Wicked, A Minecraft Movie) are two methods used successfully to distinguish cinema from TV, but most mid-budget films like Karate Kid: Legends – and even plenty of blockbuster-sized fare – struggle to look as impressive relative to TV as they did twenty years ago.
All of which makes the oncoming slate of TV-to-film spin-offs all the stranger. The team behind Amazon’s Jack Ryan series is currently shooting John Krasinski’s first feature in the role; pure prestige TV hit Peaky Blinders is following in Breaking Bad’s footsteps and releasing a feature-length sequel on Netflix this year.
It’s telling that the recent franchise most successfully reinvigorated for the big screen, Downton Abbey, is based on a show which ended in 2015 – back when the barriers between film and high-end-TV were only just starting to break down at pace. When the third film, The Grand Finale, arrives later this year, memories of the story’s modest ITV roots mean Julian Fellowes and co can do more-or-less whatever they can imagine on even the smallest Hollywood budget.
Can “untitled Jack Ryan film” offer similarly rising stakes? For a show which has already hopped from Yemen to Los Angeles, killed rooms full of masked goons and promoted its hero to Deputy Director of the CIA, what opportunities does a feature-length runtime offer? Is the jump from TV to film a step-up, or just a horizontal move?
Should we even expect it to? Or, like The Karate Kid fans, should we resign ourselves to cinema and TV being more of the same – similar stakes in subtly different packaging? Legends might be underperforming as a blockbuster; the Karate Kid brand, though, is doing just fine. Which do we value more?
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