Just because I knew at 11 years old that Karate Kid III was bad, it didn’t mean the movie was all that bad. I sat down to rewatch it, open to the idea that the movie might be better than I remember. God, how I wish that had been the case.

Karate Kid: Legends put up a decent fight, but couldn’t strike down mammoth competitors like Lilo & Stitch and Mission: Impossible—The Final Reckoning at the box office. The Jackie Chan and Ralph Macchio-led sequel sparred its way to $21 million in its opening weekend—a decent haul but lower than Deadline‘s initial projections.

Legends before we even knew what Karate Kid: Legends was. The film was announced in 2022 but it took more than a year after that for the news to break that both Ralph Macchio and Jackie Chan would star,