There’s no reason the Karate Kid franchise should still work — which is exactly why it does.
The original dropped in 1984. It’s 2025. And yet, here comes another installment: Karate Kid: Legends, hitting theaters May 30. Ralph Macchio is back. So is Jackie Chan. And now, they’re in the same movie. Two generations of martial arts mentors, teaming up to train a new kid — Li Fong, played by American Born Chinese breakout Ben Wang — in a reboot that pulls from both timelines. It shouldn’t work. But it always does.
That’s the trick with Karate Kid: it evolves just enough to stay young. It bends but never breaks. The core is still there — humility, resilience, the kind of honor that comes from losing first and learning fast.
The franchise never relied on capes or cosmic stakes. No gods. No aliens. Just bruised egos, bloody knuckles, and broken homes.
That’s why it sticks. It’s not about fighting. It’s about earning your ground. Even Cobra Kai, the Netflix spinoff that could’ve gone full parody, played it straight. It gave old characters new depth, flipped the moral compass, and pulled in a new generation without losing the old.
The franchise isn’t afraid to change faces. Hilary Swank took the lead in 1994. Jaden Smith rebooted it in 2010. Now it’s Ben Wang’s turn.
The baton passes without ceremony. No multiverse monologue. Just a new kid, a new sensei, and the same fight to matter. That’s what makes it real.
Financially, it still kicks. The 2010 version made $359 million worldwide. The franchise total sits over $430 million — not counting Cobra Kai’s streaming dominance. Even now, with Chan reportedly dislocating his shoulder on set at age 70, the films keep selling stakes as something earned, not animated.
The secret’s simple: there’s always a kid who doesn’t belong. Always a bully. Always a mentor with too much past and just enough patience. The dojo changes, the accents change, the year changes. But the lesson never does.
Tom Cruise once invited me to a Mission: Impossible set.
It was Mission: Impossible III, directed by J.J. Abrams. I had to drive a good 45 minutes into the California desert to get there. But when I arrived, there was nothing desert about it. There were crashed cars everywhere. A freeway overpass split in half by a controlled detonation. A helicopter hovering on standby.
Tom’s scene called for him to run full-speed through the debris, leap over the hood of a scorched-out car, and sprint away from a rising helicopter skimming a wrecked freeway set.
In the middle of the take, as blades chopped overhead and dust flew, Tom Cruise turned, locked eyes with me, grinned and shouted:
“Scott, are you having fun yet?”
I’ll never forget it. Because I knew he was.
Tom Cruise is the last action hero.
In a world of pixels, he bets his body.
In Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning (2025), Cruise walks the wing of a biplane mid-flight, upside down, no visible harness. He dives into a submarine in a 125-pound diving suit. He leads a full-speed sled chase through the Arctic. He throws fists on Paris rooftops with the Eiffel Tower in the background.
It follows what he did just one movie earlier: base-jumped off a cliff on a motorcycle. Held his breath underwater for six minutes. Skydived from 25,000 feet. Clung to a moving train. Hung off the side of an Airbus as it took off.
He’s not just starring in these. He’s building them.
Cruise produces these movies. He greenlights the stunts before the scripts. He’s the last actor in Hollywood designing blockbusters around physical action instead of digital illusion.
He’s an unadopted Wachowski. A man trying to make films that still make you say, How in the world did they do that?—not What software did they use?
And it’s working. Top Gun: Maverick hauled in $1.5 billion and helped pull theaters back from the brink. Even Dead Reckoning, in a crowded release slate, outperformed most green-screened franchises struggling to recapture relevance.
Because when you go to a Tom Cruise movie, you’re not just watching a character on a screen.
You’re watching a man still willing to sprint straight into danger—just to show you what movies can do.
