The one and only reason why Clint Eastwood hates ‘The Karate Kid’ with a passion
As a heart-warming and uplifting tale of triumphing against the odds that combines the fish-out-of-water and coming-of-age stories with the tropes of the underdog sports movie and the martial arts flick, there aren’t a lot of reasons to hate The Karate Kid, but Clint Eastwood had a pretty big one.
The living legend doesn’t speak ill of other people’s work, but that doesn’t mean that he wasn’t quietly seething behind closed doors. On paper, there’s absolutely no reason for one of Hollywood’s most revered actors and filmmakers to despise John G Avildsen’s franchise-launching classic, but he did.
What kind of grudge could an indisputable icon of the silver screen harbour against a classic that recouped its budget more than 15 times over at the box office, inspired a wave of blatant imitators, introduced Pat Morita’s Mr Miyagi in an Academy Award-nominated performance to the masses, and reinforced its enduring popularity four decades later through the sequel series, Cobra Kai?
As often tends to be the case in the business, the answer is pure, unbridled nepotism. Having Clint Eastwood as yer da opens up plenty of doors that would otherwise remain shut, but in certain cases, even having a bona fide A-lister and one of Tinseltown’s most famous faces for a father isn’t enough to break down some barriers.
Alison Eastwood has made her living as an actor, and she’s appeared in six of her old man’s pictures, and he also executive-produced her directorial debut, Rails & Ties, through his Malpaso banner. Francesca Eastwood made her acting debut in The Stars Fell on Henrietta, which he also produced, and played minor roles in another three of his features.
Scott Eastwood made his onscreen bow in Flags of Our Fathers, but he wasn’t cast in American Sniper despite auditioning for a movie that his dad was directing, but he’d already popped up in Grant Torino and Invictus to show that it wasn’t personal. That leads us to Kyle Eastwood, who decided that he didn’t want to be an actor at all.
Like his siblings, he was in five of his father’s films between The Outlaw Josey Wales and The Bridges of Madison County, before pivoting to music. As a composer, he’s worked with the four-time Academy Award winner on nine pictures in various capacities, as well as releasing ten studio albums, and he’s also the sole reason why the patriarch was left seething at The Karate Kid.
Clint Eastwood helming The Karate Kid sounds bonkers, not to mention miles outside of his wheelhouse, but Sandra Locke dropped the bombshell in her memoir, The Good, the Bad, and the Very Ugly: A Hollywood Journey, that he was going to do it if his only non-negotiable condition was met. “Clint had agreed to direct Karate Kid for Columbia, only if Kyle played the lead, but they refused,” she wrote.
After not getting his way, he did what any reasonable person would do, and “forevermore banned Coca-Cola from his sight,” since The Coca-Cola Company had purchased the studio in the early 1980s, reaffirming Eastwood as a Pepsi guy from that moment on.
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