Tucked away in a sprawling, apparently underutilized video production and post-production facility on a side street in East Hollywood, dozens of people have gathered to watch a new kind of entertainment, micro dramas or “verticals,” the mobile-friendly stories that have created work, creative outlets and new opportunities in Hollywood’s battered local economy.
The LA Vertical Drama Market was created to give the growing community of people acting in, writing, directing, producing and distributing micro dramas a chance to show off what they’ve made, learn to write for the very specific new kind of entertainment, said founder Dana Protsyshak, 28. The Ukrainian-born former economics student began exploring micro drama opportunities just a year ago, quickly finding it needed many of the things that traditional Hollywood has long had: markets for talent and projects, social opportunities, creative development, and more.
“I felt like this industry was emerging, but there was no place to have this kind of gathering,” Protsyshak said. But if ever there was a time to start building support systems for a nascent business, it’s now.
At a time when unemployment rates in traditional Hollywood sectors are approaching 40 percent, at least in the Los Angeles area, micro dramas represent a low-cost, low-pay alternative that’s turning into a real business.
The pace of production can be blistering compared to traditional Hollywood. Kelly Ann Parker, who spent 17 years as an independent feature producer, said she’s already produced or executive produced 10 vertical shows in 2025’s first nine months for her company, Candy Bar.
Others at the conference said they’ve already acted in as many as 15 micro dramas, each spreading 50 episodes across 80 minutes. Or they’ve written a a dozen shows. Speed to market is essential, with dozens of micro dramas hitting the market every month.
The genre took off in China, which continues to dominate the business in revenues, audiences, and output. But U.S.-focused productions are blossoming quickly in the fractured business, led by pioneer Crazy Maple Studio, whose Reelshorts is a go-to app for those looking for the shows.
Other big players, most Chinese and with their own mobile apps, include Drama Box, Flare Flow, Seral+, Dramawave, and MyDrama, the rare non-Chinese company (like Protsyshak, it’s Ukrainian).
Brandan Dannehy, head of strategy and content for Stratagem Content, said the industry generated $350 million in the first quarter of 2025, with annual revenues expected to top $1.4 billion.
Dannehy is critical of traditional Hollywood studios, who have yet to jump into the business, a long-time industry pattern with streaming video, where Netflix now far outstrips all the traditional studios in market value and audience share. For that matter, most studios were leery of television, back in the 1950s, and then cable television, before realizing both were gigantic new business opportunities.
“One thing Hollywood is very bad at is pivoting quickly” to emerging media opportunities, said Dannehy. “They’re very aware (of micro dramas), they’re investigating them, but they’re not ready to invest capital until they feel like they can make money from it, until there’s an actual ecosystem.”
Indeed, I heard about the LA Vertical Drama Market from an online-marketing buddy who was attending as part of a project he’s doing on behalf of one of the major studios.
Not everyone in Hollywood is waiting for the old powers to catch up, and not just those attending the LA Vertical gathering.
Cineverse, whose Chairman Chris McGurk was my long-ago boss at MGM, recently announced a micro-drama joint venture with Banyan Ventures, headed by former ABC Entertainment executive Lloyd Braun.
MicroCo, the JV’s temporary name, will “be the first U.S.-based studio and AI-native platform built specifically for high-quality microseries: serialized, short-form, mobile-first content specifically designed for modern viewing habits.” Former Showtime President of Entertainment Jana Winograde will be CEO, and Susan Rovner, former chairman of entertainment content at NBCUniversal TV and Streaming, will be chief creative officer.
“It reminds me a lot of when (Cineverse President, Technology and Chief Product Officer) Tony (Huidor) and I in 2016 were playing around with FAST and started launching channels,” said Cineverse President and Chief Strategy Officer Erick Opeka. “The difference is I’m considering this now potentially already a multi-billion-dollar business in the United States.”
Opeka called the burgeoning micro drama industry “an entire kind of shadow Hollywood that’s emerged alongside the real Hollywood.”
Projections for the nascent industry are sky-high, somewhere between $8 billion and $14 billion a year, which Opeka cautioned should be “taken with a grain of salt, but the data points all point to a real business.”
Cineverse, which operates a couple of dozen ad-supported and subscription networks, provides tech for running such channels, and has a small theatrical business, “isn’t looking to be the 41st micro drama app,” Opeka said. “The problem is there’s massive brand confusion, poor (user interface/user experience), the quality varies a lot. There’s room for a lot of improvement on the tech side. We’re looking to be the Roku of micro dramas.”
Parker’s company, Candy Bar, is part of Inkitt, a website where writers submit projects, similar to long-time writer platform WattPad. The most popular projects are turned into micro dramas as well, but shot in traditional 16×9 landscape format before being reframed into a vertical alignment, Parker said. That preserves the company’s option to also sell a traditionally formatted version of the project to outlets such as Apple and Roku.
It’s a different model from Parker’s past life as a film producer, where she would meet regularly with literary managers to buy promising books for development into films. Now, the projects come to Inkitt, the best get voted up by fans, and she helps turn those into micro dramas.
Money people are starting to notice the opportunity too. Parker said some of her previous long-time film investors are now getting interested in micro dramas, asking if they can finance a slate of, say, 10 projects.
The cost of such a slate financing deal is dramatically lower, maybe $1 million, a bargain compared to even the traditional indie film projects Parker was long involved in producing. Even a modestly priced indie slate might cost $30 million, she said.
Don’t mistake the micro budgets for micro earning power, however. Strategem Content’s Dannehy said the most successful shows can generate tens of millions of dollars, helping finance other productions that don’t do as well.
The business model is a familiar one, though not to Hollywood. It’s lifted from the mobile game business, where small, incremental transactions and deeply engaging entertainment experiences keep millions of players coming back, and back, for more.
That approach isn’t surprising when you realize that the entire sector was birthed in China, where mobile games are a massive business with powerful, data-driven economic structures that rely on big-spending “whales” who spend outsized amounts on favored titles.
Tina Randolph Contogensis, founder of Eris Talent Agency, said when her group initially looked for clients who might want to participate, pay scales were too modest to interest her firm’s roster of film and TV actors.
“So we had to go to our commercial roster, and lo and behold, they’re making more money than the film and TV actors,” Contogensis said. “These people are working, and they’re not having to bartend. We have people making $1,000 to $1,500 a day for good lead (roles). That’s not a bad payday.”
One question hanging over the burgeoning sector is when the Hollywood trade unions such as SAG-AFTRA will try to organize the production and distribution companies. Unionization would bring far higher pay and better working conditions, but higher production costs, if not as high as those that have helped send so much traditional Hollywood production out of town, seeking cheaper places to produce.
The union issue has also kept the traditional Hollywood media companies out of the sector. All are signatories to the contracts with unions representing actors, directors, cinematographers and the rest, which blocks the studios from producing non-union projects of any kind.
Another question facing the industry is whether it can break out of a set of specific genres, appealing to a specific demographic. Protsyshak said the audience is typically over 35 and female, typically from the Midwest. Other kinds of genres might appeal to other kinds of audiences, opening up the business even more.
One common conversation overheard at her conference, which featured a series of writing labs among other offerings, was how to structure and balance stories to appeal to this existing audience, or tweak it to attract new ones.
The current audiences expect shows with a strong male and female lead character, probably both white, and the male possibly secretly a billionaire. One actress told me that as a lead, she has to tamp down her responses, because she’s effectively the on-screen representative of her viewers as the story unfolds. But for the people in villain roles, she said, the directors tell them to “play it big.” =
For these existing audiences, Christmas movies from Lifetime are frequently invoked as a spiritual ancestor in approach and mindset. For all the romance, the shows are often surprisingly chaste, holding off even a kiss until well into the story to build will-they-won’t-they engagement.
“It’s more about anticipation,” said Cineverse’s Opeka. “The Chinese, in developing this format, stumbled on a turbo-based version of the three-act structure, but they do it in two minutes. It’s a propelling narrative that’s very enticing. These things are designed to be very compelling by their structural design.”
Alongside the conversation about appealing to existing audiences is how to expand to new ones, perhaps with new kinds of genres such as horror. Opeka said the MicroCo team will look at ways to extend shows into adjacent genres beyond pure romance.
For example, romantic comedies, which have repeatedly stiffed in traditional movie releases over the past decade, might be one way to extend into new audiences. Same with romantic thrillers.
The business is getting increasingly global too, beyond just China and the United States. Anton Skrypets, a licensing and partnerships executive with AMO Pictures in Kyiv, Ukraine, said his company has 20 production units around the globe, though 13 are based in his home country.
Though most of the company’s top-performing productions featured Ukrainian actors, AMO is now working with U.S. actors.
“Even if they have European accents, we’re trying to reach U.S. audiences,” Skrypets said. “We have the data and we see that we reach the U.S. audience the most.”
And there may be opportunities with new kinds of distribution. Why, some at the Vertical Market asked, haven’t dating apps, whose usage rates have been plummeting, started sponsoring steamier micro dramas within their apps? That could drive engagement at a time when all of those apps are losing users.
“I’ll be interested to see if bigger streaming players get involved, if the models will all be the same,” said Candy Bar’s Parker. “Are they going to monetize in different ways? I’m surprised we haven’t seen more of them do much shorter (productions), then if you want to see more, you have to tune into the full-length movie. Maybe there will be more choose-your-own adventure things. Perhaps there’s a story that’s popular on Hallmark, and within that there are flashbacks to when the performers were younger, but can only see that story on their app.”
Perhaps one holdup for many Hollywood skeptics is what’s called the “ghost of Quibi,” the startup from Hollywood and online veterans Jeffrey Katzenberg and Meg Whitman that raised $2 billion to finance subscription short-form stories featuring A-list talent. Launched in 2020, weeks after the pandemic lockdown began, Quibi shut down just five months later, after burning through more than $1 billion.
Fast forward to now, however, and it’s clear this is no Quibi situation, though much basic infrastructure built in Hollywood for movies and TV over the decades now is needed for micro dramas, Opeka said.
The sector lacks “an entire ecosystem of stars, fans, outlets,” Opeka said. “There’s no IMDB for micro dramas. You don’t know who’s in these things, who makes these things, when they’re premiering. There’s no second window (of distribution), no third window. There’s no place to see old things. There’s no ad technology. If you look at all that, to me that’s the more compelling space.”
And there’s no widely accepted source of third-party data, vital for any ad-based alternative distribution approach. That said, Dannehy pointed out there are already many ways for the business to make money, not just per-episode micro-payments. And that helps make for a business with very bright prospects indeed.