130.8 million was what the original Karate Kid made in 1984.
370 million today.
The budget was 8 million or 22.8 million.
The average wide release theatrical movie has a budget of 65 million dollars, a little under 3x what Karate Kid would cost today.
Karate Kid released in 1984 and also became the 5th highest grossing movie in the world that year.
That success followed into the sequel.
Karate Kid II made 10x from budget to box office, making 130 million dollars in 1986 money on a budget of 13 million.
After that, the quality had a noticeable drop with the two other sequels made.
Karate Kid III made 39 million on a budget of 12.5 million.
Karate Kid IV crashed the franchise, making only 15.8 million on a budget of 12 million, that lead to a loss of over 10 million dollars.
This rebounded in 2010, where the Jaden Smith reboot came out, making 359 million dollars on a budget of 40 million.
Cobra Kai just came out with season five on Netflix and before now, never really looked at the financials of the Karate Kid movies.
I didn’t realize that every single movie released in the franchise could be argued as an indie movie, seeing how they were all done on very low budgets. Despite that, most of them made enough money, they could compete with large budget films.
This continued with Cobra Kai, where it was reported the first season was made on a budget of 25 million, which is extremely cheap for today’s streaming standards, with Disney+ giving each marvel show about 25 million an episode.
Still, the first season of Cobra Kai was a massive hit premiering on YouTube Premium, getting over 50 million views with the pilot and it was reported millions made YouTube Premium accounts just for the show.
Figuring out the success of Karate Kid, it’s fairly simple.
Karate is popular with kids, where it was reported 6 million US kids took some sort of martial arts classes in 2003.
There was also a massive demand for karate movies, with the success of Enter the Dragon, which came out in 1973 in Hong Kong, but succeeded with several US re-releases, making over 120 million in the US by 1982.
There’s not really much more to this, but having just finished Cobra Kai season 5, I needed to write something like this.