Americans are obsessed with watching short video dramas from China

I was told by more people that the set of a short drama does not necessarily seem so different from an independent film or commercial shots, except for the fact that everything has churned out much faster to save on costs. While a traditional shot would last weeks or months, the entire season of a vertical show is generally filmed within two weeks.

Nicole Mattox, one of the vertical stars that work with Reelshort in Los Angeles, told me that usually books from two to three sprouts in a month, with only two days of the middle. An actress trained professionally originally from Texas had been only in some small cinematographic productions before stumbled on the short dramatic industry in 2023. But he says that he quickly learned to remember all his jokes – an impressive feat, considering that the platforms usually shoot a dozen pages of screenplay per day, while a traditional film can only shoot three.

Mattox says that his acting coach told her that his performances must not be unrealistically dramatic; Rather, it is only that any development of the plot is incredibly significant for its characters. For example, in the imaginary world of a vertical drama, a romantic break can be your whole life. “There is nothing else to go on. There is no more future for you. Everything is ruined,” explains Mattox.

Creation of global stars

Hao, who works in the recruitment of talents for Reelshort, says that many actors from the company come from advertising models or backgrounds and have never had conversation roles before. Now, they can act in a dozen shows in one year and rapidly grow their career.

Reelshort Mattox’s third production was played by a romantic comedy on professional ice hockey called Break the ice. Mattox played the personal assistant of an NHL player, who of course, was also his secret mother. The show has become a successful success, with over 300 million views on Reelshort.

Mattox claims to have been surprised by how dedicated his fans are, a large number of those in the Philippines. In May, some of them paid to put a photo on a billboard in Times Square to celebrate his birthday. At the beginning of this month, they rented another advertising billboard in Manila to advertise his latest production. Your show “I had in a choke”, wrote a commentator on his personal Tiktok account, where he accumulated over 130,000 followers.

What Reelshort did after Break the ice It has become a success demonstrates the real secret behind its success. The company quickly adapted it for the Spanish and Japanese language markets, but rather than dubbing the existing dialog box or simply exchanging the actors, has changed the key aspects of the plot. In the Spanish version, the male protagonist became a footballer, while in the Japanese version it was a baseball star. The original series debuted in July 2024; The adaptations filmed at the local level fell in September and December the same year.

In Hollywood, that type of speed is unfathomable. Four years after the Netflix Korean show Play of squid It has become a global feeling, the American adaptation is said to be only in the processing. The short dramatic industry can move much faster not only because its production costs are low, but because startups like Reelshort have learned the art of location, after all, they had to first export the genre from China. While Sensor Tower says that the US public still represents about 49 percent of global revenues, half of the downloads of short dramatic apps this year came from Latin America and the South -est Asia. This explains why Reelshort produced its successful English show The double life of my billionaire husband In five other languages and because he started working with the production companies of Telenovela Legacy in Colombia.

Chinese roots

Reelshort’s parent company, Crazy Maple Studio, was previously controlled by the majority by the Col COL group, one of the largest publishers of digital novels in China. The startup now says that its founder, Joey Jia, owns the company, although with the Group he continues to hold 49 percent of the shares. Even if the genre becomes global, most people who create short dramas in the United States still seem to have Chinese or Chinese immigrants, largely because they are more familiar with the way it works.

Jay, a manufacturer of short drama based in Los Angeles, says that the industry still looks in China by orientation and inspiration. One of the key lessons he learned from China is the importance of collecting extremely granular user data. What episode did you stop looking at people looking at a show? Which made them register for a subscription?