My partner recently confessed something to me about his screen-time habits: When he’s giggling at his phone, he’s often watching short English-language soap operas that have begun showing up on his social feeds. The plots are basic, the acting is exaggerated, and the performers are stereotypically good-looking, but the constant twists and turns keep him spellbound and wanting more.

I knew exactly where these videos were coming from. It’s been four years since I first heard about the exploding popularity of Chinese vertical soap operas called 短剧, or duanju. Since then, the industry has become fully entrenched in foreign markets, including Hollywood.

Remember the streaming platform Quibi? It lasted only six months from start to finish. Compare that with three-year-old ReelShort, the first platform to export Chinese short dramas to foreign markets, which says it now has 55 million monthly active users. In the first quarter of 2025, ReelShort and similar apps like DramaBox, GoodShort, and DramaWave earned nearly $700 million from in-app purchases—either weekly subscriptions or one-time payments to watch an episode. That’s roughly 300 percent more than they earned during the same period last year, according to the market intelligence firm Sensor Tower. Globally, these apps were downloaded 370 million times in the first quarter, a 500 percent increase from 2024. So how did short dramas from China quietly become the hottest thing in entertainment seemingly overnight?

ReelShort arrived in Hollywood at a time when the legacy movie and TV business was struggling. Many actors and production teams were on strike or out of work after the major streaming giants slashed funding for original programming. Companies making vertical dramas were becoming more powerful and ambitious than ever, and they became a lifeline for some entertainment workers.

ReelShort representatives told me the company still sees itself as occupying a middle ground between TikTok and Netflix, but it looks to me like they are no longer satisfied with just being something in between. The company is rapidly expanding into different genres, including reality TV, thrillers, art house, and more. It recently launched a global competition for new show ideas pitched by social media creators. And it’s building fandom empires for its most successful actors, turning them into genuine international stars.

At least for now, the company says it’s continuing to double down on real, human actors and writers, rather than going all-in on artificial intelligence. “I don’t think it will even come close to what humans can do when it comes to the nuances and how people follow emotion,” says Sammie Hao, head of talent relations and brand partnership at ReelShort.

What Exactly Are Short Dramas?

Short dramas are similar to low-budget feature-length movies, but filmed vertically and cut into one-minute episodes (they almost always end on a cliff-hanger.) The size of the cast and investment in things like props and costume design is minimal. But compared to an amateur TikTok sketch, they are much more professional and regularly incorporate visual effects, editing, and directing.

To be honest, the short drama industry is still largely defined by storylines that hinge on tired tropes: the salacious adventures of a billionaire’s housewife, affairs with sexy werewolves and vampires, or rags-to-riches fairy tales. But they reliably deliver a shot of dopamine when they appear on your social feed, drawing traffic and generating revenue for the platforms.

I’ve been told by multiple people that the set of a short drama doesn’t necessarily look that different from an indie movie or commercial shoot, except everything is churned out much faster to save on costs. Whereas a traditional shoot would last weeks or months, the entire season of a vertical show is typically filmed within two weeks.

Nicole Mattox, one of the vertical stars working with ReelShort in Los Angeles, told me she usually books two to three shoots in one month, with only two days in between. A professionally trained actress originally from Texas, she had only been in a few small movie productions before stumbling on the short drama industry in 2023. But she says she quickly learned how to remember all of her lines—an impressive feat, considering that the platforms usually shoot a dozen pages of script a day, whereas a traditional movie may only shoot three.

Mattox says her acting coach told her that her performances don’t have to be unrealistically dramatic; rather, it’s just that every plot development is incredibly meaningful for her characters. For example, in the fictional world of a vertical drama, a romantic breakup can be your entire life. “There’s nothing else for you to move on from. There’s no future for you anymore. Everything’s ruined,” Mattox explains.

Creating Global Stars

Hao, who works in talent recruiting for ReelShort, says many of the company’s actors come from modeling or advertising backgrounds and have never had speaking roles before. Now, they can star in a dozen shows in a single year and quickly grow their careers.

The third ReelShort production Mattox starred in was a romantic comedy about professional ice hockey called Breaking the Ice. Mattox played the personal assistant to an NHL player, who naturally, was also his secret baby mama. The show became a runaway success, with over 300 million views on ReelShort.

Mattox says she has been surprised by how devoted her fans are, a large number of whom are in the Philippines. In May, some of them paid to put a picture of her face on a billboard in Times Square to celebrate her birthday. Earlier this month, they rented another billboard in Manila to advertise her latest production. Your show “had me in a chokehold,” one commenter wrote on her personal TikTok account, where she has amassed over 130,000 followers.

What ReelShort did after Breaking the Ice became a hit demonstrates the real secret behind its success. The company quickly adapted it for the Spanish-speaking and Japanese-speaking markets, but rather than dubbing the existing dialog or simply swapping the actors, it changed key aspects of the plot. In the Spanish version, the male protagonist became a soccer player, while in the Japanese version, he was a baseball star. The original series debuted in July 2024; the locally filmed adaptations dropped in September and December the same year.

In Hollywood, that kind of speed is unfathomable. Four years after the Korean Netflix show Squid Game became a global sensation, the American adaptation is still only rumored to be in the works. The short drama industry can move much faster not only because its production costs are low, but because startups like ReelShort have mastered the art of localization—after all, they first had to export the genre from China. While Sensor Tower says US audiences still represent about 49 percent of the global revenues, half of downloads of short drama apps this year have come from Latin America and Southeast Asia. That explains why ReelShort produced its hit English show The Double Life of My Billionaire Husband in five other languages, and why it has started working with legacy telenovela production companies in Colombia.

Chinese Roots

ReelShort’s parent company, Crazy Maple Studio, was previously majority-controlled by COL Group, one of the largest digital novel publishers in China. The startup now says its founder, Joey Jia, owns the company, though COL Group continues to hold 49 percent of shares. Even as the genre goes global, most of the people making short dramas in the US still appear to be Chinese immigrants or Chinese Americans, largely because they are more familiar with how it works.

Jay, a Los Angeles–based short-drama producer from China, says the industry still looks to China for guidance and inspiration. One of the key lessons it learned from China is the importance of collecting extremely granular user data. Which episode made people stop watching a show? Which one made them sign up for a subscription?

Jay gave me a specific example: Actors, she says, often react with the same loud gasp and shocked expression when they are slapped on screen. But if one show found that instructing an actor to kneel to the ground after getting hit in the face increased engagement, then all of the company’s productions would typically incorporate the same thing into their plots.

I think there’s something discreetly Chinese in the way these data-driven insights are finding their way into short-drama productions outside of China: The cheesy plots and cliff-hangers, no matter how simple they seem to be, are the result of years of hard work by Chinese scriptwriters who cracked the formula for evoking strong emotions from their viewers.

Jay says when a script from China is being localized in the US, there’s sometimes a tendency among producers to make big adjustments to align with local cultural norms. But changing too much also risks undermining what made the show a hit in the first place. At the end of the day, “this is not an industry that encourages innovation, unless you can prove that the innovation resulted in real revenues,” Jay says.