In Hollywood, abandoned sequels usually belong to movies that failed.

The Karate Kid was the opposite.

The 2010 film opened at No. 1 in North America with more than $55 million, then finished its theatrical run with roughly $359 million worldwide against a reported $40 million production budget. Within days of its opening weekend, Sony executives were already hearing pitches for a sequel.

On paper, everything was in place for Dre Parker’s story to continue.

Instead, audiences spent the next 15 years without Dre, Meiying, Cheng or Dre’s mother Sherry Parker — even as the larger Karate Kid franchise eventually found a way to bring Jackie Chan’s Mr. Han back.

That makes the 2010 movie one of the strangest chapters in the franchise: successful enough to launch a sequel, important enough to remain canon, but somehow separated from almost every young character who made its world memorable.

Dre’s story was never supposed to stop in 2010

Sony’s official description of the film centers on 12-year-old Dre Parker, played by Jaden Smith, whose mother’s career takes them from Detroit to China.

Dre struggles to adapt, becomes close to classmate Meiying and attracts the hostility of Cheng, a skilled young kung fu student. After Dre repeatedly finds himself outmatched, building maintenance man Mr. Han reveals his own martial-arts abilities and begins training him.

By the finale, the relationships have changed considerably.

Dre defeats Cheng in the tournament, but the ending does not treat Cheng as a simple monster who has been vanquished. Cheng ultimately presents Dre with the trophy, while he and the other students show respect to Mr. Han.

Meiying is there supporting Dre. Sherry watches her son complete a transformation that began when the two of them arrived in Beijing as outsiders.

It felt less like the closing of a universe than the end of its first chapter.

Sony apparently felt the same way.

Only days after the June 11, 2010 U.S. release, reports said Columbia Pictures executives were meeting with writers about possible sequel ideas. Later that summer, Cyrus Voris and Ethan Reiff were hired to work on the follow-up.

But that was only the beginning of a development process that would stretch on for years.

The sequel got much further than many fans remember

This was not simply a case of a studio casually saying, “Maybe we’ll make another one.”

Work continued.

By 2012, screenwriter Zak Penn had been brought in to rewrite the sequel. Then, in April 2014, Sony hired The Crazies director Breck Eisner to direct, with Jaden Smith and Jackie Chan expected to return as Dre and Mr. Han.

For a moment, Karate Kid 2 looked real.

Then the familiar problems of long-gestating Hollywood projects began piling up.

Eisner left only months after being hired, with scheduling conflicts cited at the time. Jeremiah Friedman and Nick Palmer were then brought aboard to write another version of the screenplay, following earlier work by Voris, Reiff and Penn.

The sequel had now cycled through multiple writers and a director without reaching production.

And there was another problem that could not be solved by another rewrite.

Jaden Smith was growing up.

Jackie Chan eventually explained what went wrong

Years later, Chan offered perhaps the clearest glimpse into why the sequel never became the reunion audiences expected.

Speaking in 2017, he recalled that there had indeed been plans for Karate Kid 2, but said the script “wasn’t right.”

Then, when the idea resurfaced years later, the young cast was no longer so young.

Chan joked that they would have to call the movie Karate Men because the kids had grown taller than him. In another interview during the project’s long development, he joked that the filmmakers needed to hurry before Jaden became too tall.

It was a surprisingly simple explanation for a mystery that had lasted years.

The first film had succeeded. The studio wanted more. Writers kept trying to find the right story.

But development took so long that the very premise built around a child learning from Mr. Han became harder to continue in the same form.

Eventually, the sequel that had been designed around Jaden Smith and Jackie Chan simply never happened.

Then Mr. Han returned — without Dre

That might have been the end of the story if Karate Kid: Legends had not arrived in 2025.

The new film did something that once seemed unlikely: Jackie Chan returned as Mr. Han, while Ralph Macchio returned as Daniel LaRusso, linking the world of the 2010 movie with the older Karate Kid continuity. The story instead focused on a new teenager, Li Fong, played by Ben Wang.

But there was no Dre.

And suddenly, a much older question became relevant again.

Had the franchise kept Mr. Han but quietly erased his first student?

Director Jonathan Entwistle said no.

Asked directly about Dre, Entwistle confirmed that the character still exists and remains canon. He explained that Dre simply was not connected to Li Fong’s particular chapter, while leaving open the possibility that Dre still matters to Mr. Han’s history.

That confirmation changes the mystery.

The question is no longer whether the 2010 movie “counts.”

It does.

The question is what happened to everyone else.

So where are Meiying, Cheng and Sherry Parker?

For now, the franchise has given no comparable on-screen update on the three characters who formed the most important relationships around Dre outside Mr. Han.

Meiying’s story ends with her friendship — and young romance — with Dre restored after tensions with her family. She attends the tournament and watches his victory.

But the movies have never told audiences whether Dre and Meiying remained together, stayed friends or eventually went separate ways.

Cheng’s future may be even more intriguing.

He spends most of the film as Dre’s intimidating rival, but his final moments suggest that his defeat has changed something in him. His decision to honor Dre and Mr. Han gives Cheng a small redemption arc just before the credits roll.

What became of him after that moment has never been explored.

And then there is Sherry Parker.

Dre’s entire story begins because Sherry moves her son from Detroit to China for work. Taraji P. Henson gives the movie its parental perspective — a mother watching her child struggle in a place where both of them are starting over.

If Dre is still part of this universe, Sherry logically belongs somewhere in his history too.

Yet Karate Kid: Legends offers no reunion and no update on that family.

Mr. Han moved forward.

The world surrounding his first student remained frozen in 2010.

The actors themselves took very different paths

Jaden Smith continued acting after The Karate Kid, including starring opposite his father Will Smith in After Earth, appearing in Netflix’s The Get Down and later leading the romantic drama Life in a Year. He also increasingly built a career in music.

Henson’s career grew even larger. She became a television phenomenon as Cookie Lyon on Empire and played NASA mathematician Katherine Johnson in the Oscar-nominated Hidden Figures.

Wenwen Han, who played Meiying, maintained a far lower Hollywood profile, with only scattered later acting credits.

But perhaps the biggest surprise belongs to Zhenwei Wang, who played Cheng.

Anyone who assumed the young martial artist simply disappeared after The Karate Kid would be wrong.

Wang continued working in action cinema, including both acting and stunt work. His later credits include Hidden Strike, starring Jackie Chan and John Cena, and 2025’s The Shadow’s Edge, another Jackie Chan action film. He has also accumulated stunt credits, keeping him much closer to the martial-arts world than his long absence from the Karate Kid franchise might suggest.

There is something oddly fitting about that.

Cheng disappeared from Dre Parker’s story, but the performer behind him never truly left action behind.

And that may be why the unanswered questions surrounding the 2010 film feel more interesting now than they did a decade ago.

Karate Kid: Legends proved that the movie was never erased. Mr. Han returned. Dre still exists.

Which means the strangest question is no longer whether that chapter counts.

It’s whether the franchise will ever show us what became of the kids who made it memorable.