Hollywood’s romance with micro dramas is heating up. Will it last?

SUNNYVALE, California – A young woman is desperately trying to raise $50,000 for life-saving treatment for her mother. She will receive the money, but only if she agrees to her stepsister’s unusual proposal: to marry a wayward groom who comes from a wealthy family, but also has a criminal record.

This is the plotline of the episode “The Double Life of My Billionaire Husband.”

This may sound like a telenovela. In fact, it is a popular series that appears on ReelShort, an app where viewers can watch amazing soap opera-like dramatic stories called microdramas on their smartphones.

Unlike a regular TV show, this drama unfolds over 60 episodes, each lasting between one and three minutes. After six episodes, viewers moved to a paywall, where they could continue to watch ad-free with a $20 weekly subscription, watch ads, or pay as they went.

Since its launch in 2022, the series has already racked up over 494 million views, and ReelShort reports that it has made over $4 million from the show.

The microdramas, with titles like “The Billionaire Sex Addict and His Therapist,” “How to Tame a Silver Fox” and “Pregnant with My Ex's Dad,” rely heavily on sensationalism and have small budgets, typically less than $300,000 per episode. And a lot of them were filmed in Los Angeles.

Short-form dramas first became popular in China, where they are hugely popular and generated $6.9 billion in revenue last year. surpassing the domestic box office, According to DataEye, a Shenzhen-based digital research company.

Now Hollywood is starting to pay attention to the small format.

In August, the venture capital arm of Lloyd Brown – a former ABC executive and chairman of talent agency WME – and Los Angeles-based entertainment studio Cineverse formed a joint venture called MicroCo to create a micro-drama platform.

“Traditional Hollywood has moved away from an entire genre and narrative that fans love, and I think micro-dramas have really taken advantage of that and really leaned into that fandom,” said Susan Rovner, chief content officer at MicroCo.

Studio interest

Major studios are investing in micro-dramas as they try to emulate China's success and find new ways to reach younger audiences accustomed to watching short videos on TikTok, YouTube, Instagram and other platforms while on the go.

Fox Entertainment recently announced the acquisition of a stake in Ukrainian micro-drama producer Holywater. As part of the deal, Fox Entertainment Studios (a division of Fox Entertainment) will produce more than 200 vertical videos for Holywater over the next two years.

And the Walt Disney Co. accelerator program, which invests in startups, recently named micro-drama company DramaBox, whose parent company is based in Singapore, as part of its 2025 program.

David Min, vice president of Walt Disney Co. on Innovation, said he believes micro-dramas will continue to be successful, especially among younger audiences accustomed to watching entertainment on their phones.

“We need to be where everyone is consuming their content, and this is an opportunity for us,” Min said in an interview. “…It's just another new platform to experiment with and explore and see if it's right for the company.”

Sunnyvale, Calif.-based ReelShort says it will host more than 400 shows this year, up from 150 last year.

All productions are filmed in the United States and mostly in Los Angeles, ReelShort CEO Joey Jia said in an interview. The company plans to build a studio in Culver City that will film its most popular micro-dramas.

“We offer a lot of options,” Jia said.

Warsaw-based DramaShorts said it plans to produce 120 microdrama projects in the United States in 2026, with the number increasing from 45 to 50 this year. About 25% of them will be in the Los Angeles area.

“People are used to consuming content through social media, through TikTok, through Instagram, through Facebook and sharing information,” DramaShorts co-founder and chief operating officer Lev Ovdienko, 29, said in an interview. “I think it’s only a matter of time before big players emerge at this stage.”

The company works with production partners in Los Angeles who hire actors, writers and crew members who work on fast-moving projects, a bright spot in a struggling job market.

“The good thing about filming in Los Angeles is that it’s the epicenter of Hollywood,” said executive producer, writer and director Chrissy De Guzman, who has worked on DramaShorts projects. “We know how things are in our industry right now, so a lot of talent has moved into the vertical space.”

While the vertical dramas take up the length of a film, they are broken up into bite-sized chapters and come together quickly. A 100-page script can be shot in just one week, rather than a month like a feature film.

Each chapter usually has a cliffhanger or dramatic moment, be it a slap in the face or a character being in danger.

“It hits every little emotional point,” said Caroline Ingeborn, chief operating officer of Palo Alto-based Luma AI, which provides artificial intelligence tools to micro-drama companies. “It's so addictive and because it's so easy to click on [Play]. You just have to watch the next episode.”

Labor tension

Because of ultra-low budgets, many productions are not affiliated with unions, prompting some writers and actors to work under pseudonyms to avoid sanctions from their unions, several people who work on the series said.

In an effort to address this issue, the artists' union SAG-AFTRA recently announced agreements covering low-budget vertical dramas.

Writers Guild of America West President Michelle Mulroney said in an interview that the union recognizes that “there are companies that are trying to do this work outside of the union, so the guild wants to help our members … in a way that they can work vertically and ensure that this work is covered.”

Micro-drama producers said they welcomed negotiations with unions but expressed doubt that their business models could support union contracts.

“We're not anti-union at all,” said Eric Heinz, executive producer of Snow Story Productions, which produces vertical dramas for platforms such as DramaShorts.

Despite the labor tensions, these short dramas became a key source of employment for Hollywood workers who struggled to find work as production moved from California.

Corey Gibbons, 44, a director of photography, said vertical dramas kept him in business when other work dried up.

“I feel like we’re on the cusp of something that’s really going to change,” Gibbons said. “I'm just glad to be a part of it.”

So did actor Sam Nejad, 27, a former “Bachelorette” contestant who began starring in vertical dramas in January. He said that since then he has landed one or two lead roles a month and can earn $10,000 a week.

“This is a new art,” Nejad said. “The new Tarantino, the new Scorsese, everyone is going through this.”

ReelShort's Sunnyvale office looks more like a typical Silicon Valley startup than a Hollywood studio.

Jia, the CEO, sits at a table in the open floor break area with her employees. Framed posters line the office walls with headlines like “Prince with Benefits,” “Never Divorce Your Secret Billionaire Heiress,” and “All the Wrong Reasons.” Jia notes with pride why each program was noteworthy during the recent space tour.

“I don’t have the money to hire celebrities,” Jia said. “I rely 100% on history.”

46-year-old entrepreneur with an electrical engineering education., launched his business in 2022. At that time, there was no particular interest from Hollywood studios.

The skepticism followed the high-profile collapse of Quibi, a startup led by studio mogul Jeffrey Katzenberg and tech chief Meg Whitman that worked with A-list movie stars on series that appeared in short chapters on the app. Kibi raised $1.75 billion.just to malfunction approximately six months after launch.

Jia took a different approach. Instead of signing expensive contracts with celebrities, he hired students or recent graduates from colleges like the University of Southern California to work for his company.

Jia endorses all of the micro-drama stories on ReelShort, which he says will generate $1 billion in revenue this year.

A ReelShort spokesman declined to disclose the company's revenue but said the business is profitable.

Jia said ReelShort has 70 million monthly active users, 10% of which are paid users.

Churn — the rate at which customers give up weekly subscriptions — can reach more than 50% at ReelShort, Jia said. Therefore, it is critical for a company to have a constant stream of content that encourages customers to keep paying. It currently has over 400 proprietary titles and approximately 1,000 licensed titles.

Like others in the genre, ReelShort and DramaShorts rely heavily on data metrics like customer retention and paid subscribers to make content decisions.

“A lot of directors think when I make a film, 'I don't care what people think, this is my creation, this is my story,'” Jia said. “No, this is not your story. Your success… must be determined by people.”