Vancouver director Brianne Nord-Stewart recalls seeing a Facebook post looking for someone to helm One Last Temptation Before I Say I Do, a vertical microdrama for the Singapore-based short drama platform GoodShort to shoot locally.
An initially skeptical Nord-Stewart tells The Hollywood Reporter she eventually said yes to the gig because she knew the super short drama’s producer, Sammie Astaneh, and had served as an intimacy coordinator on a half-dozen other local microdrama shoots. “I figured, because it was Sammie, the (production) would be at a standard that I would want to be involved with in making sure the crew was well taken care of. That was my biggest concern,” she recounts.
Directing the fast-paced ultrashort set around a high-stakes dating reality show where eight contestants in a luxurious mansion explore different partners has also been about getting behind a microdrama production boom in Vancouver. “I thought, if I’m going to direct a vertical, it’s going to be because I’m looking to invest in relationships,” Nord-Stewart explains.
Other creatives and crews in Vancouver also chasing work have embraced the city’s watershed moment in microdrama production as much else in traditional film and TV remains uncertain. Having already got to the pinnacle of America film and TV as a major production hub for the major studios and streamers, the Canadian west coast city has now got in on the ground floor as China’s microdrama format boom reaches North America.
“I joke and say they’re like the cockroach of film. I don’t mean they’re gross or they’re lesser,” adds Monika Dalman, a Vancouver-based casting director and consulting producer on microdramas who cast One Last Temptation Before I Say I Do. She has worked with around 20 microdrama apps like GoodShort on local shoots.
“I just mean they survive. There’s something about these stories that really draw people in, and especially at times of chaos and confusion,” Dalman added. Verticals as the next big thing for Vancouver creatives and crews follows a major consumer shift in the entertainment ecosystem where made-in-China microdramas that combine the immediacy of social media with the soapy emotions of TV dramas have started to captivate U.S. audiences.
The short mini-series offer mostly female viewers bite-sized content in 60-90 second shots, with each strategically written with a hook, a spike and a cliff hanger to get viewers onto the next episode. Driving production growth for the shortform genre in Vancouver are major Hollywood studios and streamers now catching onto a niche genre that launched in China in 2018 and flourished during the COVID pandemic.
Unlike Jeffrey Katzenberg’s short-lived Quibi streaming platform, microdramas have exploded in global appeal as series production outside of China increasingly centers on Canada’s west coast, with interest and investment starting to come from Hollywood.
“You have this format that has the subscription bingeability of Netflix, the compulsive mobile format of TikTok and the soapy tropey allure of telenovelas,” Catherine Warren, president of Vancouver-based entertainment consultancy FanTrust tells THR about microdramas. Warren is looking to launch FanTrust Verticals as a global network of major studios, influencer marketers, microdrama directors and producers, casting agents and verticals app platforms looking for new revenue streams.
And with its top creatives, crews and soft money long used to making Hollywood films and TV series, and Chinese producers and editors and international students working locally, Vancouver is seen as a natural base on which to build a fast-growing production hub for global microdramas.
“Vancouver has a huge Chinese population specifically. We have a lot of investment. We have people who speak Mandarin and Cantonese. We have business people and entertainment leaders here, and the talent on the film, TV and digital sides. So it makes a lot of sense that we would have been a test bed for a model that is just exploding when people understand the language, the culture and the dealmaking behind microdramas,” Warren adds about the local production landscape.
Casting agent Dalman agrees Hollywood players will look to Vancouver to get their own share of the upside from developing and producing their own microdramas: ‘The (U.S.) networks and their studios are thinking about how to work verticals into their business model.” The goal would be keeping viewers engaged with Hollywood’s next generation of TV apps, rather than see consumers migrate to microdrama apps like ReelShort, DramaBox, CandyJar and NetShort for bite-size drama fixes.
That’s a shift for Hollywood away from movies and TV series that play best on horizontal formats to short dramas designed for vertical play on mobile phones. The first episodes in a series are the most important for microdrama apps as they can be accessed for free before a paywall has hooked viewers with a cell phone in one hand paying $20 to $40 to see what happens next before a whole season ends.
And the U.S. market has now become the largest ad revenue driver for the Asian-based microdrama apps, leaving Hollywood studios playing catchup in an attention economy they invented with red carpet movie premieres and where the profit from snackable microdramas comes off the backend.
With that global market upside up for grabs, indie producer Jimmy Wu of Vertical Film Vancouver has shot around 17 short series for microdrama app platforms in the last year, and is now moving into developing and financing his own original verticals. Wu just released Mafia Boss Owns My Body, an original microdrama budgeted at $140,000 for a six-day shoot and which has been released by ReelShort as part of a licensing deal.
“There’s so many new platforms coming up, and there’s new North American platforms. The market wants content and is demanding content. So we’re trying to provide a large slate of premium content. That’s how we plan to stand out among many competitors,” Wu tells THR.
Amid an ongoing decline in traditional linear TV networks, microdramas are forecast to generate $11 billion in global revenues in 2025, according to market intelligence firm Omdia. Wu points to Disney Accelerator, an incubator program where Disney works with emerging companies on new shows and formats, recently signing a partnership deal with DramaBox that could lead to a producing deal.
And with microdramas and their fast-paced, high stakes storytelling often compared to soap operas and telenovelas, Nic Westaway, who played Kyle Braxton in 368 episodes of the Australian soap Home and Away, has found virtually non-stop work on microdramas since arriving in Vancouver.
“I knew how to hit my mark and know my lines and find my way into a scene. I think that’s why I’ve been called back again and again by all these different companies,” Westaway tells THR. Over the last 18 months, Westaway has starred in 28 verticals, including One Last Temptation Before I Say I Do.
Each series episode is shot, edited and released on microdrama app platforms with a premium put on quickfire plot twists and cliffhangers. “Watching ten minutes gives you someone crying, someone yelling, someone being slapped. There’s been major plot twists,” Westaway observes.
And there’s a heavy workload for microdrama actors, with verticals shoots typically scheduled for six to 10 production days, with anywhere from 10 to 20 script pages shot each day. “When you’re doing that many scenes, especially in a lead role, you have a lot of lines to learn, and if you’re not on top of them, it does make shooting days very tricky as you won’t have too many takes once everything is set up,” Westaway points out.
That said, local players say Vancouver has moved away from an early Wild West for microdramas when it comes to production standards by bringing up budgets, the quality of scripts and protections for creatives and crews.
“So many of us here are working to make there’s proper safety standards, really good working conditions, that people have intimacy coordinators and a very rapid professionalization to what is now becoming a very quickly a mainstream and important part of the production economy,” FanTrust head Warren argues.