The Rise of Vertical Dramas: A New Era in Streaming
In a leafy Los Angeles garden, a mafia boss dressed in a flamboyant white suit stands at an altar, shooting wildly into the rows of seats in front of him as his guests dive for cover. The wedding has been infiltrated by a team of assassins, but the young don is not going down without a fight. He continues to fire at his enemies, using his body to shield his petite bride from the flying bullets.
“Cut!” director Xiang Sining cheerfully shouts from behind the monitor. That’s a wrap for Kidnapped by the Mafia, a romantic drama that went on to become a hit after its release in late June. Xiang is part of a wave of Chinese filmmakers that are enjoying a meteoric rise in America as pioneers of “vertical dramas” – a new format that essentially tries to reimagine television for the TikTok generation.
Vertical dramas, also known as micro dramas, are scripted shows that are divided into bite-size episodes, each lasting just a minute or two, with the scenes normally shot in a vertical format in the manner of a TikTok or Instagram Reel. These shows are engineered to give viewers a quick dopamine hit. The storylines are fast-paced, melodramatic, and crammed with werewolves, evil stepmothers, and brooding billionaire husbands. Episodes frequently climax in a screeching plot twist.
“When television was first invented, no one thought it would surpass movies,” Xiang told the Post. “Vertical dramas are the same today.”
The Global Expansion of Vertical Dramas
Vertical dramas first took off in China during the pandemic. A string of titles went viral on local short-video apps like Kuaishou – which offered a few episodes for free before charging users to unlock the rest – and the industry quickly snowballed as investors piled into the market. By late 2024, more than 660 million people in China were watching vertical dramas, data from the China Netcasting Services Association showed. The shows generated revenues of 50.4 billion yuan (US$7.02 billion) that year – more than the Chinese film industry’s total box office, according to the digital research firm DataEye.
Now, the industry is starting to replicate that success globally. Dozens of Chinese-backed vertical drama platforms have launched on global app stores over the past few years, and several have already attracted large user bases, with ReelShort, DramaBox, and GoodShort emerging as early leaders.
The industry began to attract mainstream attention in America in late 2023, when The Double Life of My Billionaire Husband – a drama about a young woman who marries the troubled scion of a wealthy family, directed by Xiang – became a breakout hit, garnering over 485 million views on ReelShort alone. ReelShort, the platform that distributed the show, shot up to number two on the download charts on Apple’s US AppStore soon after, even briefly overtaking TikTok to top the entertainment category.
A flurry of media coverage followed, and the industry continued to gain traction from there. During the first quarter of 2025, vertical drama apps received more than 370 million downloads worldwide, a sixfold increase compared with the same period last year, according to a report by the Chinese data platform Sensor Tower.
A Growing Audience and Changing Industry Dynamics
For Jennifer Cooper, a diehard vertical drama fan from the United Kingdom, shows like The Double Life of My Billionaire Husband are taking off because they are fast, fun, and fill a hole for romantic dramas in today’s entertainment market. “I am always looking for romantic storylines, especially romantic comedies,” she said. “Hollywood doesn’t make many any more. I got bored of Hallmark, and too many TV shows that I enjoyed on Netflix have been cancelled.”
Cooper estimated that she now spent as much as GBP200 (US$265) a month on watching vertical dramas by paying to unlock extra episodes. She is not alone. Total in-app purchases on the platforms reached nearly US$700 million in the first quarter, a close to fourfold increase year on year, Sensor Tower found.
The US entertainment industry appears to have taken note. In May, Netflix announced it was launching a mobile-only vertical feed, allowing users to scroll through short edited clips of the company’s shows. Then, in late July, Disney unveiled plans to invest in DramaBox through its accelerator programme.
Challenges and Opportunities in the Vertical Drama Market
For Xiang, it is only a matter of time before more Western production companies jump into the market, as short-video apps like TikTok have “fundamentally changed the way people consume entertainment products.” But for now, Chinese platforms continue to dominate the vertical drama scene, with American-educated filmmakers like Xiang acting as vital conduits between a largely Chinese industry and a rapidly expanding global audience.
Xiang moved to the US to attend film school at the University of California, Los Angeles, but he struggled to find work after graduation, when the US entertainment industry was still reeling from the pandemic and the 2023 Hollywood strike. So, when a platform called ReelShort approached him in 2023, asking him to direct a drama he had never heard of, he decided to take the gig. That show went on to become a hit for the platform, and he was soon offered a series of other vertical drama projects.
Shooting the shows is an intense process, with the platforms putting filmmakers under pressure to deliver at speeds that were previously unheard of in the industry. For the platforms, the strategy is to churn out a huge volume of titles at an ultra-low budget – a kind of “throwing spaghetti at the wall” approach to hit making.
“Normally, a crew might shoot four to five pages of a script per day,” Xiang said. “But in vertical drama production, we shoot about 10 pages a day, finishing an entire script in eight to 10 days – a completely different pace from traditional Hollywood productions.”
The Future of Vertical Dramas
As the industry matures, production standards are starting to improve, according to Xiang. The action in The Double Life of My Billionaire Husband was mostly confined to moodily lit offices, but his latest project features underwater scenes and an outdoor gun battle.
But the pressure to deliver content quickly and cheaply is also ramping up as competition among the platforms intensifies. Ma Wendi, another Chinese filmmaker who got into vertical dramas after graduating from film school in the US, now flies his cast from North America and Australia to a studio in Zhengzhou, China, to save on filming costs.
“It’s very like Spaghetti Westerns,” Ma said. “Currently, most English-language vertical dramas in the US cost between US$130,000 and US$200,000 if shot locally. But if you film in China to simulate an American setting, it’s about US$100,000 to US$150,000.”
According to Ma, filming in China also has creative advantages. It is possible to rent helicopters, stage car crashes, and access many other resources within a tight budget, which is simply not possible in America. That is allowing him to move beyond the romantic drama genre, which has dominated the industry up to now.
“Our next project will target a male audience,” Ma said.
Once a show is released, the platforms rely on “massive investment” in advertising to drive traffic – mostly via a blitz of ads on social media platforms such as TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram, according to Xiang. Most of the shows will flop, but the profits from a hit series can cover the losses of multiple failed shows. If a show generates a net profit of 50 per cent after production and promotion costs, it is considered highly successful in the industry, Xiang said.
Not everyone is sold on this business model. Eric Zhang, the founder of LSP, a US-based media company that produces vertical dramas, said the industry’s reliance on “traffic investment” made it highly risky for investors. Though the platforms’ skyrocketing revenues and viewing figures looked impressive, many shows barely made a profit once the massive ad spend was taken into account, he stressed. In the long run, this approach could prove unsustainable.
“Many vertical drama companies are riding a tiger they can’t dismount,” Zhang said. “In my view, this is a bubble floating on molten lava.”
Xiang and Ma also questioned the platforms’ current creative process, which focuses on using Chinese writing teams to pump out new scripts or rework domestic hit dramas for export. Though the approach saves time and money, many of the resulting shows are not well suited to the international market.
“Remaking domestic hits with the same themes and formulas will lead to making vertical dramas with settings and cultural elements that feel very ‘unlocal’,” Ma said. “Many products fail to sell and flop in the market for this reason.”
But for Xiang, standards in the industry are bound to improve as time goes on. If new players enter the market, they will have to.
“This is an emerging industry,” he said. “As major players like Netflix enter the scene, breaking through with high-quality production and creative content is the only path for vertical drama companies to succeed.”