Hollywood Starts Copying China's Vertical Short-Drama Playbook

The latest import racing up Hollywood's development slate is a format China built. Fox and NBCUniversal are moving into vertical short dramas — the phone-first, episode-a-minute serials that Chinese production teams turned from a novelty into an industrialized global business — and the news is being discussed on China's own internet as a backhanded compliment: the copyists have become the copied.

The scale behind the format is easy to underestimate. Hengdian, the Zhejiang film complex long nicknamed “the Hollywood of the East,” now styles itself “Vertical Hengdian”: the state-linked Zhejiang account 美丽浙江 reports the base produces thousands of vertical micro-dramas a year, about a tenth of which sell to overseas markets, making the format one of Zhejiang's “new three” cultural exports. A widely shared video post put the audience numbers bluntly: “Ninety-four million people pay to follow these shows. Can Chinese vertical dramas really overtake Hollywood?”

The economics explain why studios are tempted. A vertical drama shoots in days, plays full-screen on a phone in one-to-two-minute episodes, and monetizes through cliffhanger paywalls rather than ads or subscriptions — a model Chinese platforms refined into a machine that can test hundreds of titles a month and scale the winners. What began as domestic fare for taxi drivers and factory shift workers became an export product, dubbed and subtitled, finding audiences in Southeast Asia and then the United States, where homegrown apps now sit high in the app-store charts.

But the Baidu discussion, which framed the news as “Hollywood copying China's homework,” carries a caveat the industry itself has learned: translating Chinese plots — billionaire heirs, revenge brides, hidden identities — only carried the format so far. The excerpt of the report making the rounds notes that overseas viewers now want stories set in their own lives. That is the stage where Fox and NBCUniversal enter: not buying Chinese dramas, but adopting the production model to make American ones.

For China's studios, the move is validation and a warning at once. The format they industrialized — on Hengdian soundstages built for costume epics, now repurposed for shoots that wrap in a week — has grown big enough for Western studios to compete on it directly. The next season of the format's global race will be decided not by who invented vertical drama, but by who localizes it best.