Hollywood embraces microdrama

TikTok has disrupted social media since its arrival less than a decade ago. Now another media product from China that entered the US quietly a couple of years ago is gaining momentum, gathering storm and disrupting the US entertainment industry.

It's called duanju in Chinese, known as microdrama in the English world. Vertically filmed, one to two minutes per episode, 60 to 100 episodes per series, and engineered to end on a cliffhanger so precisely timed that it has firmly hooked millions of viewers who can't stop watching and paying, paying and watching.

"This is worse than a Hallmark movie by far, but I had to obsessively finish it anyway. Wish it was a little longer even!" one viewer commented on YouTube under a 27-minute teaser of the microdrama The Double Life of My Billionaire Husband from the ReelShort platform.

Released two and a half years ago, it has garnered total viewership of over 500 million on ReelShort — becoming the most viewed series.

US Hallmark movies are known for their feel-good and predictable storylines — often featuring big-city characters finding love in small towns.

"The acting is terrible as [expletive] but I'm still hooked, the story is good," the most-voted comment said.

"The bass drop, the overdramatic turn, the horrible acting … It's all so imperfectly perfect," another viewer wrote.

The ability to generate an obsessive audience has turned the microdrama into a large market. In China, it overtook the domestic box office in 2024 at $7 billion.

The US has become the distant No 2 market, accounting for roughly 50 percent of the global market outside of China.

Appeal of microdrama

Many analyses show that the world of microdramas is populated by billionaires, powerful CEOs, or alpha males who possess supernatural powers as werewolves or vampires. They exist only to discover the virtues of a woman — often a damsel in distress — save her from her evil antagonists and fall in love with her.

There are rich heiresses — but before her esteemed status and mega wealth are revealed, she somehow lives in poverty and is constantly humiliated by others. When the truth about her comes to light, she glows, stands tall over those who have once humiliated her, and the audience savors the sweet revenge of status inversion.

Every episode ends worse for the heroine, the stakes stack higher and higher until the revenge kicks in. Revenge, love, rags to riches, it is candy-coated high drama, sweet and intoxicating.

A full character arc that takes a Korean drama 16 hours to develop is compressed into the first 10 to 15 minutes. Algorithm-driven, the format's engagement mechanics are explicitly engineered around the brain's cognitive pattern — people can't let go of cliffhangers and must know what happens next.

China-developed algorithmic infrastructures and emotional formulas are visible in many story plots — a contract or pretend marriage for unfathomable pretense, a billionaire with a secret crush, and jealousy and possessiveness interpreted as signs of love.

However, with US-based studios, the microdrama has been localized in many aspects: American faces, English dialogue and US settings mixed with werewolves and vampires.

Sarah, a Houston teacher in her 50s, knows that she's watching something more like a fantasy.

"I believe that many viewers, just like me, know that the plots are ridiculous and the acting not that great. But, after a long day dealing with difficult kids in school, it feels relaxing and satisfying watching a single mom finding love with a handsome, rich guy and getting revenge over her fake and humiliating friends," Sarah told China Daily. "My brain gets a break and I feel emotionally well."

An avid Harlequin romance novel reader, Sarah said microdrama brings the handsome men and beautiful women on the book covers to life, and "they are a pleasure to behold."

Britton Copeland, a 20-some writer, described her experience to NPR last year.

"Despite the cheesy acting, the clip ended on a cliffhanger, and I desperately wanted to see what happened next. I ultimately decided I wanted to watch the entire film … so I poured a glass of wine and indulged in what I have determined is my generation's soap opera."

Microdramas do more than feed our imagination — they capture the full spectrum of urban life, with all its highs and lows.

Wildflower, a microdrama currently in production, celebrates ordinary women who are gentle yet powerful. Through the storms of life, they quietly grow toward the light.

"It tells quiet, raw stories of modern women navigating love, marriage and daily grit. Like wild grass, they bend but never break — resilient, tender, rooted. This series is a mirror for every woman seeking herself, healing softly and rising with quiet power," said Zhang Xinyuan, presenter of Wildflower.

The Chinese microdrama audience is 55 percent women and 45 percent men, primarily in the lower socio-economic class. In contrast, the US audience is primarily urban women between 30 and 60 years old with significant subscriptions to streaming services.

An essay from The New Feminist written by Lotte Hondebrink called the majority of microdrama stories "the problematic fantasy women can't stop watching".

"The explosive growth of microdrama apps like ReelShort highlights a tension between women's desire for escapist romance and the unsettling power structures that shape so many of its storylines," she wrote.

Zhao Yehui, a New York based filmmaker, said the microdrama arrived as Hollywood is experiencing a downturn and producing far fewer rom-com films than it used to.

"Microdrama borrowed the typical rom-com tropes, but the plots are often flattened and simplified, and the drama is intensified. They create many cliffhangers with one surprise after another," Zhao said.

"Those typical tropes employed in rom-com and soap opera in the past continue to be popular with the audience," she said. "Their popularity reflected a reality that both China and the US are a patriarchal society."