Hengdian World Studios, the largest film complex in existence, takes its name from the pastoral town in southern China that it bestrides. On a frosty Tuesday afternoon in February, I took a cab through farmlands and faded storefronts, toward a hulking replica of the Forbidden City. I had come to see the set of a micro-drama—one of the serialized soap operas, split into minute-long episodes, that have mesmerized global audiences. Across from the mock imperial grounds, I was dropped in front of what appeared to be an abandoned apartment building. Inside, I found myself in a neon-lit bar, where a crush of Chinese crew members clustered around four white actors in suits, dresses, and powdered makeup.

“Three, two, one, action!” an assistant director shouted in English. The actors sprang to life, staging a lurid scene in which an evil mistress named Selina frames the heroine for killing her unborn child. (“You killed my baby!” Selina cried.) In a back room, the director, a wiry man in his forties, fired off notes into a headset in Mandarin. “Tell Selina she needs to look more wronged,” he said. “She wasn’t acting hurt enough.” His team stared at four large vertical monitors. On set, the assistant director translated the notes, and within seconds the cast had launched into another take.

The micro-drama, or duanju, emerged around 2018, and became popular on Douyin, the Chinese precursor to TikTok. While the rest of the world was getting hooked on cat videos and bedroom-dance routines, Chinese creators were tinkering with something more ambitious: serialized shows shot vertically, for phones, and packed with racy plots, absurd twists, and great swells of emotion. During the pandemic, a whole industry coalesced around the form. Several micro-dramas went viral on TikTok; in 2025, an app called ReelShort, which is partly backed by a Beijing-based company, was downloaded thirty-eight million times on Apple’s U.S. App Store, more than Netflix. Among its hundreds of series, which include “The Double Life of My Billionaire Husband,” “Fated to My Forbidden Vampire,” and “My Firefighter Ex-Husband Burns in Regret,” the quality ranges from brisk entertainment to prurient slop, but viewers are rapt. Today, nearly half of China—and perhaps a tenth of humanity—has watched a micro-drama.

The industry first broke into my social circle, in Shanghai, in January, when a German filmmaker friend was hired to join a set in Xi’an, the ancient capital known for its terra-cotta warriors. He wasn’t an actor, but he was white, which put him in demand; he would earn nearly four thousand dollars to play an American Mob boss for three days. When competition overheats, some Chinese companies opt to chuhai, or “go out to sea,” and many micro-drama producers are eager to expand the genre’s international appeal. At one point, my friend was added to a WeChat group that included nearly five hundred foreign actors, many of whom were sharing casting calls to make sure they weren’t being scammed.

China’s discovery of a new form of entertainment—one already worth billions of dollars—has put it on a collision course with the incumbents in Hollywood. In October, Fox Entertainment said that it plans to produce more than two hundred micro-dramas in the next two years. A new micro-drama app called GammaTime is backed by Kim Kardashian and a former executive from Miramax, and another has been announced by Lloyd Braun, the executive behind “The Sopranos.” On a podcast last June, Kevin Mayer, a former C.E.O. of Disney and TikTok, explained that there was “no longer the revenue base” to sustain the old pipeline of expensive television productions. Micro-dramas, with their low-cost, fast-paced storytelling, may be the new frontier.

Hengdian is known for churning out patriotic war films and imperial costume dramas, but last year it hosted more than four thousand micro-drama crews, compared with just five hundred film and television ones. The production that I visited had been contracted by a Chinese company for release on a major micro-drama app, and the story—tentatively titled “On My Knees for My Silent Ex-Wife”—was a revenge fantasy overflowing with antic conceits. Audrey Hudson, twenty-four, is a gifted battlefield surgeon who feigns muteness to comfort Carter Reynolds, a combat soldier deafened by an explosion. Four years later, the two are married, Carter has been promoted to colonel, and he is aggressively unfaithful. The drama unfolds as a sequence of revelations that culminate in Carter’s rank humiliation: not only is Audrey not mute, she is the daughter of the U.S. Secretary of Defense, and her father has been orchestrating Carter’s career “ascent” all along. By the time Carter is begging for Audrey’s forgiveness, she has accepted a proposal from a much worthier suitor, the President’s son.

“It’s a pretty cliché setup,” a producer named Vivian told me, but that was the appeal: viewers, especially those who had been wronged by a partner, got “to feel powerful through the heroine.” Vivian, who is in her thirties, wore a black baseball cap, loose sweats, and a thick fur coat twice her size. The show’s four lead actors had been flown in from the U.S., Canada, and Australia, she said, because they needed to have believable accents. (For extras, Vivian had relied mostly on Russian models working in China.) As we toured the set, Vivian asked me how “American” everything looked. The bar seemed too spacious for Manhattan, I mused, but it could belong in Chicago. Vivian smiled. “As long as it’s not a Chinese bar.”

Budgets for micro-dramas range from a hundred thousand to three hundred thousand dollars, a fraction of the cost of a Hollywood production. (Netflix reportedly spent up to sixty million dollars per episode on the final season of “Stranger Things.”) In most cases, the first few episodes of a series stream for free, and a viewer pays for the rest; profit is further maximized through a staunch commitment to efficiency, often at the expense of labor standards. In Hengdian, an Australian actress told me that she had started hair and makeup at 6:30 A.M. At 10:30 P.M., when I left the set, the crew was still filming. Vivian explained that competition was so fierce, and budgets managed so tightly, that no producer could afford to extend filming by even a day. Still, the results were hard to deny: two hours of content, spliced into sixty or so episodes, from just a week of filming.

The regretful colonel in “Silent Ex-Wife” is played by Ben Whalen, a thirty-eight-year-old actor from New York. In the fall of 2023, after spending years struggling to land consistent work, Whalen began noticing jobs on the casting platform Actors Access for something called vertical shorts. “I just kept seeing it, so I decided, Let me check this out,” Whalen told me. In the past two years, he has acted in more than thirty micro-dramas. “It’s made my life so much better,” he said. “I have some security, financially. I have a fun project to work on every few weeks. And I get to meet so many cool people and travel the world.” When I checked Actors Access in February, roughly a third of the listings were for micro-dramas. “It’s created this middle class for actors and crew members,” Whalen told me.

Heath Adam Cates, an actor from New Mexico, was on the Xi’an shoot with my German friend. “This is the first time in twenty years that I’ve legit been able to do acting as a career,” Cates told me. He described micro-dramas as a refuge from a Hollywood roiled by streaming. After a vertical shoot last November, Cates went home for Thanksgiving, where he noticed something familiar emanating from a family friend’s phone. “The fact that there’s a seventy-year-old man sitting at a kitchen table on Thanksgiving watching a micro-drama—that’s a pretty big deal,” Cates told me.

The set of “Silent Ex-Wife” teemed with the controlled chaos of any film shoot, with a few additional quirks. Nearly all the instructions were relayed electronically from the director’s cave and translated by a bilingual assistant director. (The A.D. “must be someone who’s studied overseas,” Vivian told me.) Because the cameras were vertical, actors huddled closer together, and the crew paid extra attention to upper-body details like hair and makeup. Chinese audiences prefer flat, even lighting, like that of a smartphone beauty filter, Vivian told me. But for “Silent Ex-Wife” they had opted for what they described as the style of American TV, lighting the side of the actors’ faces so that the rest fell into shadow. At one point, the crew shot a scene in which Whalen’s character joins a bar fight, shouting invectives at a hapless extra before pummelling him to the ground. Suddenly, the director yelled “Cut.” Then he burst out of his cave, plopped himself next to the extra, and said, “Watch me, like this!” The director hurled himself to the floor. This note didn’t need a translation.

Watching the set, I was sometimes reminded of “American Factory,” a 2019 documentary about a Chinese glass-manufacturing company that took over a plant in suburban Ohio, and the friction that ensued between its demanding, productivity-fixated managers and the union culture of working-class America. In Hengdian, I found work hours to be a common complaint among foreign actors. Another challenge was adjusting to expectations for onscreen intimacy, a staple of vertical dramas. In the U.S., actors’ guilds push for a dedicated intimacy coördinator, who helps choreograph the scene and supervise the filming. There is no equivalent on Chinese sets, where directors have been known to demonstrate the blocking themselves. (Vivian told me her industry now hires intimacy coördinators for overseas productions.)

Micro-drama actors can be further disoriented by the scripts themselves. “Silent Ex-Wife” draws from a popular genre of Chinese web fiction called houhuiliu, or “regret flow”: a man mistreats his wife, only to repent when her concealed social status or fortune is revealed. At the end of regret-flow plotlines, husbands tend to beg their wives for forgiveness by dropping to their knees. This act of contrition is legible in East Asia, but slightly awkward when performed by Western actors. “I don’t know if they think that’s an American thing, but it doesn’t happen in the world I know of,” Whalen told me. Whenever he plays a wealthy male lead, Chinese producers dress him up in extravagant suits and jewelry, even though, in Whalen’s view, American billionaires are just as likely to wear T-shirts.

“It’s almost a Chinese lens on American life, based on American TV they’ve seen,” Jen Cooper, a critic and the founder of Vertical Drama Love, a website dedicated to micro-dramas, told me. “It’s this strange reflection back.” Whalen said that he often tweaks a line so that it lands more naturally in English. But he was wary of questioning the underlying logic of the scripts, which tech platforms had provided and optimized for maximum engagement. The cultural missteps, he thought, might even be part of the draw, an incidental source of the form’s campy, surreal humor.

Many of ReelShort’s stickiest hits, including “The Double Life of My Billionaire Husband” and “Breaking the Ice,” can be traced to popular Chinese web-fiction tropes, including badao zongcai, “the domineering C.E.O.,” or dai qiu pao, “runaway with the ball,” which refers to pregnant heroines who raise their child on their own. In China, web fiction is an enormous industry in itself, and stories are ranked and modified, on various platforms, based on reader feedback. The best are adapted, through a similar calibration, into films, video games, and micro-dramas; by the time they reach American viewers, they’ve survived a Darwinian gantlet.

In this sense, the micro-drama pushes to extremes a process that began in the age of streaming, in which scale, data, and iteration replace taste and intuition as the engines of cultural production. When I asked executives in China why so many micro-drama scripts evince the same cheesy romance tropes, they told me their choices were governed purely by analytics. “That’s just what people are buying,” Zhou Yuan, whose studio, Content Republic, has produced top-ranked titles on platforms like ReelShort, said. Zhou used to lead Linmon Media, one of China’s largest drama-production houses, but he pivoted to micro-dramas around 2022, after he noticed that nearly every major Chinese app, including shopping platforms, had rolled out a short-video feed on their navigation screens. “We used to sit in an office in Shanghai or Beijing, write the script, push the show to market,” and wait two to three years for audience feedback, he said. With micro-dramas, if audiences don’t respond on the day a title is released, the social-media algorithm stops promoting it, and Zhou immediately changes what he green-lights. “It’s not us deciding, it’s the audience and us co-deciding,” he told me.

This feedback loop can bear strange fruit. A TikTok advertisement for the short drama “Forbidden Desires: Alpha’s Love” begins by way of a raunchy meetup. A college student named Chloe, wearing only a bath towel, accidentally encounters her semi-naked professor, Adrian, in the shower. The romance is forbidden on multiple levels: Adrian is Chloe’s professor, her stepbrother, and—for good measure—a werewolf. “Forbidden Desires” was released on the micro-drama app ShortMax in March, 2024, and received a hundred and sixty million views, according to one of its producers. One influencer on X began posting clips from the series in jest, before realizing she had been hooked: “I’m sorry but I DO need a full feature length film im so invested.”

“Forbidden” was filmed in New York by a team led by Shannon Yang, a recent N.Y.U. graduate. Born in a small town in southern China, Yang is among a new crop of young bicultural producers and directors facilitating the transfer of Chinese duanju to the rest of the world. Before she graduated, in 2024, she was very anxious. Work permits for international students can last only a year, she said, and film unions tend to privilege U.S. citizens and green-card holders. “It’s hard for filmmakers to stay in the U.S.,” Yang said, adding that Hollywood was still overwhelmingly “white-centered.”

Yang’s career solidified on a fateful trip back to China in the summer of 2023, as micro-drama companies began looking to make films overseas. What Yang lacked in filmmaking experience she made up for with her contacts in New York and fluency in Chinese short-form video. She took the “Forbidden” script, written by a Chinese web novelist, helped adapt it for American viewers, and put out an open call for a “new vertical media project.” Initially, she received a lacklustre response—actors thought she was shooting an “experimental college project,” she told me. Now Yang is fully booked; when I spoke with her recently, she was location scouting in Kansas, Chicago, and Miami. Micro-dramas “created real opportunities for international students who might otherwise have had to leave” the U.S., she told me. Without it, she added, “I wouldn’t have been able to be in a leadership role so quickly in my career.”

Still, Yang did not characterize her work, primarily, as art. A micro-drama is a product, she told me: “We first consider its audience and how it will be distributed, and then adjust its format and our creative approach accordingly.” A ReelShort spokesperson told me that one of the company’s advantages is its data about audience preference, which will help the company unlock new genres and “blast out content” in Latin America and the rest of Asia. One of the platform’s successful titles, “Breaking the Ice,” follows the dai qiu pao arc: a pregnancy, a painful separation, and a reunion with a professional hockey player. ReelShort has since adapted the story into a soccer romance in Spanish and a baseball drama in Japan.

In both the U.S. and China, mainstream film and television can seem to cater to male tastes, prizing self-seriousness and action. The global micro-drama surge is also the story of a predominantly female audience, hungry for romance and fantasy, sidestepping legacy gatekeepers. Vivian, the producer, suspected that many viewers were young mothers with a busy, fragmented schedule, who might watch episodes as they waited for laundry or picked up a child from school. Cooper, the founder of Vertical Drama Love, agreed: “There’s just a lower capacity for attention,” she told me, “because everyday life is so hard.” Part of Cooper’s attraction to micro-dramas was rooted in feeling underserved by Western film and television. “Hollywood doesn’t really make rom-coms much anymore,” she told me. “If you get one, maybe it’s a cinema release, and it’s not necessarily any good.”

There’s another way in which micro-dramas have flipped the script. For decades, Hollywood occupied a privileged place in Chinese culture. Directors like Steven Spielberg flew in with large budgets and foreign stars to shoot epics like “Empire of the Sun.” Now, Yang told me, experienced Hollywood actors were being hired by “a bunch of freshly graduated Chinese kids.” This has inevitably led to some conflicts; Hollywood actors tend to insist on their own way of doing things on set, Yang said. But she doesn’t buckle: “We usually find a middle ground.”

Just when the world seems to have caught on to the duanju craze, Chinese companies are midway through another seismic change. ReelShort’s Beijing-based investor, COL Group, also runs FlareFlow, a popular micro-drama app with thirty-three million users worldwide. This year, the company said that for titles released in China, it plans to replace three-quarters of human actors with A.I. (For overseas titles, it aims to replace only actors in very minor roles.) Ma Tao, COL Group’s head of strategy, told me that roughly three to four thousand white actors were hired for FlareFlow titles in 2025. Then came an inflection point. In February, ByteDance, the company that developed TikTok, released an A.I. video-generation tool called Seedance 2.0. Last month, Chinese news outlets began reporting drops of roughly seventy-five per cent in micro-drama crews in Hengdian. Ma called it the “ChatGPT moment for videos.”

It is generally a mystery what A.I.-generation tools like Seedance are trained on—Disney and Paramount have both accused ByteDance of training on their intellectual property—but industry insiders assume that one core data set comes from ByteDance’s marquee micro-drama app, Hongguo, which houses more than fifteen thousand titles. Last year, the début of Tilly Norwood, an A.I.-generated actress, provoked outrage among Western actors and artists, but their Chinese counterparts tend to embrace such technology far more readily. “We’re basically an A.I. company now,” Zhou, of Content Republic, told me. When I talked to Ma, in March, he had just got off a call with his Los Angeles team, who warned him that traditional Hollywood professionals were more skeptical of, and sometimes even hostile toward, A.I.-generated content. “For Chinese content companies, this is just routine,” Ma told me. “It’s already reality. It doesn’t need to be debated.”

For now, there’s a multitude of actors grateful just to be employed, and to be learning more about the world. Before last fall, Whalen had never been to Asia. When he arrived, he quickly realized that the Chinese didn’t seem to do small talk; instead of the windup he was used to, he was whisked straight into a costume fitting and a read-through. What surprised him most, though, was how familiar the set felt. The on-set archetypes of a Chinese film crew paralleled those of Hollywood. Makeup artists were gentle and soft-spoken; photography directors dressed impeccably. “A director of photography in the United States has much more in common with a director of photography in China than they have with a businessperson in the United States,” Whalen told me.

Back at the neon-lit bar, I overheard two crew members talking, in Chinese, about one of the actors. After a bit of back-and-forth, one of the crew members grabbed a plastic bag and handed it to a tall, radiantly handsome Canadian actor named Marc. Inside was a box of Chinese cigars. “Happy birthday, Marc,” the crew member said, in English. Later that evening, the set broke for dinner. The actors ate boxed meals, and the Chinese crew surprised them with a large vanilla cake. Slices were passed around; someone cued up the birthday song on a phone. Marc thanked Vivian and the rest of her team, and, for a moment, the cast and crew ate together in silence. Then they were back to work, filming deep into the night. ♦