Cobra Kai Season 6’s crazy release schedule explained – when are new episodes out?

New Cobra Kai episodes are on the way soon, but this season’s release schedule is complicated, with much of it still to be determined.

Season 6 of Cobra Kai is the last instalment before the show spins off into a new Karate Kid movie, and other potential standalone shows.

The first five seasons of the show consisted of 10 episodes each, meaning we’ve been watching Daniel LaRusso and Johnny Lawrence going at each other for 50 episodes in martial arts battles inspired by the original action movie.

But resolution is coming, via an extended Season 6, which is dropping in a pretty unusual way.

How many episodes are in Season 6 of Cobra Kai?

There are 15 episodes in Season 6 of Cobra Kai, and they are being released in three batches of five on Netflix. Here’s the plan for the supersized season:

• Episodes 1-5: July 18.
• Episodes 6-10: November 15.
• Episodes 11-15: Sometime in 2025.

With the new Karate Kid movie dropping in May of next year, expect those final episodes to release sometime in the first four months of the year.

Crazy release schedule explained

There’s method to the madness of this plan however, as showrunner Jon Hurwitz recently explained to Gizmodo.

“Right after we finished making season five, we had a pow-wow with Sony and Netflix talking about what’s next,” Hurwitz reveals. “We knew we were coming in for a landing, but we felt like 10 episodes wasn’t enough to wind up all the stories the way we wanted to. And 20 episodes felt like too much. So we’re like, ‘This should be the final season. Is there a way to make it somewhere in between 10 and 20?’

“We all landed on 15. And once we landed on 15, we were thinking, ‘How do we want that to come out?’ Because we wanted people to get episodes of the show sooner rather than later [instead of] waiting even longer for the show, because it’s been a while since we’ve been out.

“And we just started thinking of, whenever we’re writing a 10-episode season, we do it in batches of five, in a sense. It’s like we build to a mid-season finale and then build from there to the ending. And this season, it was like, ‘OK, well, three chunks of five would make sense.’

“It’s almost like three acts in a bigger story. And that’s just something that we decided to do creatively. When we talked about that with Netflix, they loved the idea of the three drops. And that’s where it came from. So we’ve known this for a very long time. And it is all by design.”

Season 6 of Cobra Kai kicks off next Thursday (July 18) when we’ll be posting recaps and detailed explainers. In the meantime, here’s a list of the best new TV shows streaming this month as well as new movies streaming.