If you have been anywhere close to the social media blast radius of The Summer I Turned Pretty, Amazon Prime’s breakout YA series on a tortuous teen love triangle, you may be familiar with the plight of Henley and Luca. The star-crossed lovers of a short-form video series called Loving My Brother’s Best Friend – plot self-explanatory – have made waves on TikTok with yearning stares and “I/we can’t do this” drama that echo the many fan edits of beloved TV couple Belly and Conrad. But whereas The Summer I Turned Pretty explored its central tension over 40-minute episodes on streaming, Loving My Brother’s Best Friend, produced by a short-form company called CandyJar, distilled its appeal to its barest essences: sexual tension hook, escalating line and cliffhanger sinker, all within two-minute “episodes” on your phone. Without even meaning to or really wanting to, I watched the first 10 chapters (of 44) in one 15-minute gulp – and I’m not the only one.
Hollywood is hoping that you, too, will be hooked. Though Loving My Brother’s Best Friend may not look like a typical Hollywood product – in fact, it resembles some mix of teen show, soap opera and amateur fan-cam edit – the industry is investing heavily in the future of series like it: low-budget, mobile-only “microdramas” with episodes between 60 and 90 seconds. These shows, also known as “verticals” for their phone orientation, have already become widely popular in China, where mobile screens dominate entertainment even more than in the US. In just three years, revenue for serialized short-form drama in China rose from $500m in 2021 to $7bn in 2024, and is projected to reach $16.2bn by 2030. The global microdrama market for 2025 is estimated at anywhere from $7bn to 15bn – and booming, with nearly triple revenue growth for microdrama companies outside China in the past year.
Until recently, major players in Hollywood stood on the sidelines, content to let such companies, which make money via advertising or user gaming app-esque “micropayments”, release risible shows including Fake Married to My Billionaire CEO or Fated to My Forbidden Vampire. But the boom in business – along with continued industry consolidation and production shifts away from California – has made cost-efficient microdrama impossible to ignore. “It is the first inning,” said Bill Block, the former CEO of Miramax whose new microdrama venture GammaTime has raised over $14m from such investors as Kim Kardashian, Kris Jenner and Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian. “This is now a firmly established market, in the beginning, with lots to explore in terms of taste.”
If ReelShort and DramaBox, as Block said, “defined and won the first round”, Hollywood is looking to win the second. In just a few months, a flurry of deals have brought industry mettle into the still nascent space, indicating a potential revolution in serialized entertainment. In August, several prominent studio veterans – former WME and ABC entertainment head Lloyd Braun, former Showtime president Jana Winograde, and ex-NBC Universal Television chair Susan Rovner – founded MicroCo, backed by tech-driven entertainment company Cineverse. In October, Fox Entertainment announced an equity stake investment in the Ukrainian company Holywater, which owns the My Drama app, with a commitment to make more than 200 new shows for the platform in two years. Disney has given DramaBox a spot in its selective accelerator program, betting the company will expand beyond werewolves and billionaire romance. Spanish-language company TelevisaUnivision is on track to release 40 telenovela shorts this year on its app ViX, with another 100 for 2026. Paramount Skydance promoted its studio film Regretting You via ReelShort and is working with the company to cross-pollinate material. Lionsgate and Hallmark are reportedly doing the same.
This is not Hollywood’s first crack at shortform content. Companies from Netflix to Sundance TV have experimented with premium short-form – often, glossy episodes south of 15 minutes – for the better part of a decade. You may recall the spectacular bellyflop that was Quibi, the “quick bite” platform founded by DreamWorks Animation co-founder Jeffrey Katzenberg and former Hewlett-Packard CEO Meg Whitman that launched in spring 2020 with high-budget series, A-list talent and $1.75bn in funding – only to fold within six months. (Its content sold to Roku for a mere $100m.)
But industry veterans are betting that things are different this time. For one, TikTok viewing habits are far more entrenched now than in 2020. And Hollywood, as a place and industry, is “going through a real moment of transition”, said Natalie Jarvey, an entertainment journalist for the Ankler who has closely tracked the rise of microdrama production in Los Angeles. From executives to directors, writers to crew, “there are a lot of people who’ve been squeezed out of jobs,” she said. “Everyone is searching for the silver bullet – what’s going to save Hollywood? What’s going to bring jobs back?”
The answer could be a $75,000 short-form filmed over a couple of days and released within weeks. “A lot of people who’ve worked for a long time in movies and TV to start to consider, well, maybe I could go work for a microdrama or I could make one myself,” said Jarvey. “It’s offering a glimmer of hope for a lot of people in this town right now.”
The barren labor landscape in Los Angeles was one major consideration for Anthony Zuiker, the creator of CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, to begin writing microdramas for Block’s GammaTime. “I have a lot of people that I love that can’t find work,” he said. Microdrama production is entirely non-union, swift and cheap – the budget for most shows hovers around $100,000 total – but it is work and it can be lucrative, with some actors minting six-figure careers virtually overnight. (Last month, Sag-Aftra, the major actors’ union, proposed a contract to allow microdrama companies to employ union actors for rock-bottom minimum rates – $250 a day for lead performers, $164 for everyone else – plus provisions for overtime, pension and health contributions, and standard protections for stunts and sex scenes. The deal has not been finalized.)
Zuiker is betting on microdramas’ potential to circumvent some longstanding structural issues with traditional entertainment. For one, the protracted timelines of film and TV production, which often stretches into the years even when things go smoothly. With microdramas, “you can write an hour movie in a couple of days, shoot for five days, and then have it on a platform in 10 days.” Zuiker has already written four bite-ified movies for GammaTime, which launched this fall with 20 titles spanning true crime, thriller and romantic melodrama.
And as traditional film and TV continues to lose younger viewers to YouTube and TikTok, microdramas could court new audiences with its “freemium” model – a chunk of episodes for free, then additional ones unlocked from a few cents to a few dollars via in-app “coins” like money in a slot machine. As a writer, “I have to understand where this is going and not just ignore it,” said Zuiker. “I see the failed broadcast model. I know the challenges of streaming and cable. This is becoming something that’s getting some momentum. Why wouldn’t I want to be in this space?”
That space comes with a host of pitfalls, not least of all the bare-bones budget. Though Zuiker has embraced the challenge of taking “high-end scripts and figuring out a way with paltry budgets, thin access to top-tier talent, thin access to top-tier directors, and making that all work for someone to say, ‘this is worthy of me paying for it,” he’s still working on the question: “how do we do premium so it’s not so awful?” A writer has less than two minutes to establish characters, stakes, and a reason to keep watching. “Organically, I’m trying to figure out the rhythm of the writing, because I think that’s the only way this will sustain,” said Zuiker. “The more we flip on TikTok, the more we’re going to want to watch movies like that on TikTok. But there has to be constructive narratives.”
There’s also the challenge of audience, somehow at once vast, fractured and siloed. Though mobile-friendly suggests a youthful customer base, the current US microdrama audience skews heavily female and over 45. Thus it’s still an open question whether the US microdrama business will expand beyond, as Bloomberg’s Lucas Shaw put in on industry insider podcast The Town, “soft-core porn” for young women, or whether higher-budget shorts, a la Quibi, can compete with the quick and cheap and free. “Everyone who’s making microdramas is looking to raise the bar,” said Jarvey. “The question is how to balance increasing the production value a little bit, bringing on some more well-known talent with not kind of losing what makes them microdramas. Because if suddenly you’re increasing the budget significantly, then it starts to look a lot more like a Quibi.”
As in Hollywood at large, some are betting on generative AI, which GammaTime uses to suggest storylines based on viewer habits, though not to actually write the material — “the hook writing, we have a respect for and appreciation of. And cliffhanger writing, too, is human-led,” said Block, but “the concepts of decision making can be AI, demand-driven.” (The company counts Slava Mudrykh, former head of Google Gaming, as a co-founder, along with Quibi’s Alex Montalvo as chief content officer.) Others, such as Zuiker, as more hesitant – “I think when that data drives the creative, it can be problematic,” he said.
Block foresees microdramas as a mode of entertainment unto themselves, with their own star ecosystems. (Fairly or not, Cosmo has already declared Nick Skonberg, of Loving My Brother’s Best Friend, to be the first “superstar” of the “vertical movie industry”.) He likened his efforts with GammaTime to those of Samuel Z Arkoff, the 1960s pioneer of independent, low-budget, youth-focused genre films – Beach Blanket Bingo, I Was A Teenage Werewolf and the like – as the old Hollywood studio system collapsed.
Hollywood again finds itself at a moment of significant upheaval – shifting viewer tastes and habits, increasingly mobile audiences, rapidly consolidating corporate power. In these shifting sands, microdramas could fundamentally alter how Western audiences consumer serialized storytelling. Zuiker predicted that in a matter of years, microdramas will “be every bit at the forefront of consumption that streaming once was, that cable once was, that broadcast once was”. Short-term, it’s “bad acting, salacious, hokey titles, billionaire’s mistress”, but “in the long term, it’ll be premium content written for the device, where the optimal experience of the flip is so enticing you can’t stop.”
Jarvey was more measured. “I think of it as what soap operas are to prestige entertainment,” she said. “I don’t think anyone who works in microdramas would say that they’re trying to compete with a Sunday night HBO drama.” (Indeed, Block does not.) “But they are trying to find that sliver of time in your day where maybe you want something that’s a little bit faster to consume, or something that’s going to hook you and keep you scrolling.”
What microdramas are still missing is a true, bonafide hit – something that escapes social media containment and reaches the majority of US audiences who likely still have not heard of the format. Something that gets and keeps the attention of skeptics. A show like Loving My Brother’s Best Friend that actually becomes a viral success like The Summer I Turned Pretty. But those in the space assure that it is still too early to judge whether microdramas are a sea change or, like many short-form initiatives before it, a passing, tech-hyped fad. “If you want to go in with a critical eye and tear apart these vertical shorts at this stage, you’ll have a field day. It’s easy to do that,” Zuiker cautioned me. They’re not going to be good, breakout hits, he said, without some more R&D, money and, perhaps, institutional support. “This is a new thing – we need to get behind this and find this so we can employ more people, tell better stories, and have an industry.”
“We are learning so much more every movie,” he added. “It’s all very TBD.”
