What If the Karate Kid Had Died?

John G Avildsen is a well known director with many credits to his name including Rocky, 8 Seconds, Lean on Me, and more. One of his best known works is the Karate Kid Trilogy (I, II, III) featuring Ralph Macchio and Pat Morita. Recently Avildsen sat down for an exclusive interview to discuss his two most prominent works (Rocky and The Karate Kid) and revealed some interesting changes he might have made given the chance.

One of the most interesting revelations is the different direction Avildsen would have taken The Karate Kid III. Instead of a rehash of the first movies story arc, he would have created a tragedy in which Daniel Larusso was killed.

CraveOnline: You did the first three Karate Kid movies. Did you have an option to do the fourth one?

John G. Avildsen: Nope. I thought that Ralph [Macchio]’s character should die at the end of the third one. He gets in a fight defending Mr. Miyagi’s honor and he dies in the fight. Miyagi feels so devastated that he says, “I taught him too well.” Then in the fourth one he meets the girl, but that didn’t happen so I didn’t pursue it.
 
Wow, Robert Mark Kamen told me that he wanted the third Karate Kid to be a Crouching Tiger style martial arts period piece. You wanted it to be a tragedy. Were you aware of Kamen’s first idea?

Actually, what I wanted the third one to be, if you remember in the second one, Mr. Miyagi tells Daniel the story of how Miyagi family karate came to be, that the ancestor of Miyagi was a fisherman. He was out fishing, had too much sake and fell asleep and woke up off the coast of China and came back ten years later with a Chinese wife and a secret to Miyagi family karate. So I thought the third one, Ralph and Pat would time travel back to ancient China and Pat would play the Miyagi character as the ancestor and we would see how that all began.

The Chinese government was all enthusiastic about it and Columbia at the time was owned by Coca-Cola. It was going to be a great opportunity for them to do business in China. There was going to be nothing political about it, but the producers didn’t want to spend the money to go to China so we just did the first one over again. The third one wasn’t very good I’m afraid. – Crave Online

Avildsen brings some wild ideas to the table and it’s easy to see how the industry executives may have gotten scared at the prospect. Of course, while Karate Kid III had its moments it is widely considered a below average effort, bringing little to the franchise. Maybe a little more boldness would have paid off after all. In terms of time travel, we are left to wonder if Avildsen means time travel in the sense of story telling or a literal time travel mechanism (hopefully he would have went the storytelling route).

Many of us in the martial arts are huge Karate Kid fans. Some of us even got into the arts directly because of those films. The latter movies (Karate Kid III, Next Karate Kid, etc) are generally considered weaker efforts but they do speak to the longevity of the franchise. Perhaps if interest persists we may see another movie describing the life and times of Daniel Larusso, but who knows? Avildsen may get his chance to kill the character after all.