Elisabeth Shue had the last laugh. She’s had a great career while Ralph Macchio’s biggest highlight post Karate Kid pre Cobra Kai was barely being in My Cousin Vinny. 

Your input after having neither read the article nor watched the show is appreciated.

Weisz disliked the script and had just given birth, so she indeed opted out. 

Interesting you bring that up, because even when they had to replace Rachel Weisz (who I assume chose not to return to the role vs being kicked out), they replaced her not with a younger actor as one would expect from Hollywood, but with Maria Bello who is in fact 3 years older.

And that whole series was full of that sort of thing. Michael J. Fox replaced Eric Stoltz when they decided he wasn’t working six weeks into shooting, and they replaced Chrispin Glover (with Jeffery Weissman wearing a mask of Glover!) in the second movie. That was so bad it actually led to a lawsuit (successfully…

Her role in the BTTF franchise was hardly a step forward in her career. She was the barely-there “love interest” who was written out of the action even more abruptly and cruelly than she was in KK.

They did. She had a killer guest appearance in Cobra Kai that perfectly rerailed the character while somehow still playing fair with what we saw in the second film.

On a tiny and incredibly uncomfortable porch swing, too! I mean, I can get onboard with the possibility of time travel, but that nap just wasn’t believable.

“Yes, sadly we’ve known all along” was a solid joke in that film.

In action movie franchises (or franchises that are action movie adjacent) it’s long been understood that it’s more exciting to do the new love interest than attempt to write an actual ongoing relationship. Even when they do decide to bring the love-interest back for the sequel, it’s almost always after being estranged…

And the folks behind Back to the Future 2 were so stymied by what to do with her character (after having painted themselves into a corner with the ending of the first film), they literally just had her go to sleep for the rest of the franchise.

Yeah after dumping Macchio she assassinated and replaced Claudia Wells and no one even said anything!

Hey now, there was an explanation - Vanessa was a fembot!

The Bond explanation goes back to “On Her Majesties Secret Service” when Tracy is killed at the end. Bond goes into a serious downward spiral of drinking and self-destruction. In the books he is given one chance to get his act together and goes after Blofeld. They make references throughout the rest of the Fleming…

On the bright side, it seems likely that Shue getting dumped from the Karate Kid franchise helped keep her from getting pigeonholed in that role. In the six years after Karate Kid, Shue was in Adventures in Babysitting, Cocktail, and two Back to the Future movies. I’m not sure you’d have seen the producers of Leaving…

I will not see Deuce Bigelow: European Gigolo or the Zoolander sequel!

There’s also a dash of laziness that’s driving decisions like this. It’s much easier to write about a boy and a girl meeting for the first time and seeing that puppy love move forward than it is to write something interesting about people who’ve been a couple for a little bit of time, especially involving Ali who was…

Not that I think the Austin Powers movies were any particularly high moment in the history of cinema, but I think at least there they were parodying the Bond films, where the female leads change every film with almost no explanation.

It’s good they at least recognized and admitted to how shitty it was to do that to Shue’s character, especially since it was just one in a loooong list of different movie franchises where a female character was written out/killed off-screen to give the male protagonist a new love interest to pursue (see: both of the…

Teen boys are known for their communication skills.