While Cobra Kai’s series finale left a hole in the heart of its huge audience, Netflix has since found the perfect follow-up for this hit. 1984’s The Karate Kid might be a beloved cult classic, but the original movie’s story is shockingly simplistic and straightforward upon a re-watch. While it is fun to see Ralph Macchio’s spunky underdog Daniel LaRusso defy the odds and beat up his bully Johnny Lawrence to earn a tournament trophy, it is hard not to end up wondering what happened to the movie’s heroes and villains after its surprisingly abrupt ending.
That is where Netflix’s six-season classic Cobra Kai comes in, filling in the blanks of Lawrence and LaRusso’s post-movie lives and proving they are both far more complicated and conflicted than the original movie implied. Although Cobra Kai ended in 2025, Netflix has since released a new boxing drama that is a perfect substitute for the show’s blend of thrilling action, bruising fight sequences, and surprisingly poignant character drama. That series is the South Korean sensation Bloodhounds, a crime drama that follows an ambitious young boxer’s attempts to take down an illegal payday loan company.
Netflix’s Bloodhounds Is The Perfect Cobra Kai Replacement
A great action/martial arts show for fans of Cobra Kai, Bloodhounds focuses on the story of Woo Do-hwan’s Kim Gun-woo. A kind-hearted former Marine, Kim Gun-woo dreams of becoming a champion boxer so that he can repay his single mother for all the sacrifices she made while raising him. However, Kim Gun-woo is a long way from achieving this dream, and his mother ends up falling prey to Park Sung-woong’s Kim Myeong-gil, the CEO of Smile Capital.
Beneath its image as an ordinary loan company, Smile Capital is secretly an illegal lending company that sends loan sharks to rough up anyone who can’t pay their exorbitant interest rates. Although it goes against everything he believes in, Kim Gun-woo is forced to team up with the troubled delinquent and fellow former Marine Hong Woo-jin so he can take down the villains at Smile Capital, and the pair soon find themselves breaking bones as they journey into the city’s criminal underworld to get to the heart of Smile Capital’s evil enterprise.
Bloodhounds Recaptured Cobra Kai’s Tone Better Than Karate Kid: Legends
While Bloodhounds is darker than even the saddest Cobra Kai storylines, the show still has a lot in common with Netflix’s Karate Kid spinoff. For one thing, Kim Gun-woo and Hong Woo-jin are perfect foils for each other, with the show’s two protagonists playing off each other like Johnny Lawrence and Danny LaRusso in Cobra Kai. For another, both shows incorporate the criminal underworld into their stories of struggling fighters trying to find legitimate outlets for their skills.
Compared to 2025’s theatrical reboot, Karate Kid: Legends, Bloodhounds ironically feels like a closer tonal match for Cobra Kai. Where that movie returned to the crowd-pleasing, uncomplicated sports movie storytelling of the original franchise, Bloodhounds shares both the bone-crunching violence and complex grey morality of Netflix’s earlier Cobra Kai, and feels like a better replacement for the spinoff as a result.
