With Los Angeles production levels in a sorry state, underemployed workers are flocking to a format that’s faster, shorter, cheaper and quite literally overturns film and TV norms.
Unlike the ill-fated Quibi, “verticals” — serialized one- to three-minute dramas filmed in portrait orientation and intended to be viewed in short increments on mobile — don’t bring Hollywood-level production value and budgets to the cellphone viewer. Instead, they are proudly low-budget and soapy, occasionally smutty and sometimes nonsensical, with common themes being: billionaires, werewolves, vampires and pregnancies. Some recent trending titles? The Alpha King and His Virgin Bride, Carrying His Babies, Stealing His Heart and Mafia Daddy’s Surprise Sextuplets.
Still, as opposed to film and TV, it’s a fast-growing format that can employ Hollywood’s idle pros, whose livelihoods have been rocked by the industry contraction and studios’ penchant for fleeing to cheaper jurisdictions. A year ago, says one actress who played a lead in a vertical, “I was like, ‘I don’t want to do those, they’re terrible.’ And then fast-forward a year, I was like, ‘Well, I would just like to make money acting.’ ” Adds Evan Brown, who stars in the Luigi Mangione-inspired vertical series The Adjuster, “It is cool to see actors work when for so long I just heard horror stories of people leaving.”
Perhaps the biggest player in the domestic space is Crazy Maple Studio, a Sunnyvale, California-based company that owns the platform ReelShort, with more than 55 million monthly active users, most of them women. Its CEO, Joey Jia, says that in early 2023, his company was putting out roughly four projects a month; now, it’s more than 30. The majority of production work takes place in L.A., with other projects going to hubs including New York, Atlanta and Toronto. “L.A. still has the most talent and the most professional crew,” Jia explains.
Rivals to his platform include DramaBox, NetShort and Goodshort, all of which also rank in the top 20 entertainment products on Apple’s app store.
Other media companies are eager to get in on the action.
TelevisaUnivision, the Spanish-language media giant, unveiled a slate of what it calls “microdramas” at its upfront in New York in May, an effort to bring its telenovela expertise to mobile via its ViX streaming service. English-language media is similarly enthused. One top streaming executive says the service they work at is actively exploring the space, both by adapting existing content that can be broken down into tiny chunks (a typical verticle series is 50 to 80 episodes) or by shooting wholly original fare. Jia says his company has been approached by “almost everybody” for guidance.
The production style, which moves at a breakneck pace, isn’t for everyone. Twelve-hour days are standard, a feature-length script might take just a week to shoot, and actors might get as few as three to five takes per setup to get their performances just right, sources tell The Hollywood Reporter. The productions try to keep budgets — and therefore wages — low, with Jia saying his tend to fall below $300,000 per project and less than $500,000 if the company is trying a new concept.
And then there’s the quality of the series. Flashbacks, wildly implausible scenarios and expository dialogue abound. One source describes the writing style of these series as “a lot of telling, not showing.”
Those who do the work say it offers a launching pad for actors starting out. (Lexi Minetree, cast as Elle Woods on Prime Video’s upcoming Legally Blonde prequel series, starred in a vertical.) Some platforms are branching out from romance into other genres, like ReelShort, which has expanded into young adult and drama stories.
Even unions are starting to take notice. At least one IATSE leader is eyeing the format as his members — who are allowed to work both union and non-union projects — take jobs in verticals. However, “They’re under the radar as far as unions go because we’re usually going for $800,000 to $1 million budgets,” says IATSE Local 80 business manager DeJon Ellis.
Are verticals the future? The verdict is out, but Marc Cotter, star of NetShort’s Love in the Fast Lane, is optimistic. “I do believe it’s evolving rapidly and will eventually reach the caliber that [Jeffrey] Katzenberg and Meg Whitman with Quibi had predicted — they were just ahead of their time,” he says. Others are clear that they’re just doing this work for the paycheck during a tough time in the business.
Wes Bailey, the CEO of SirReel Studio Services, which maintains spaces in Sun Valley, Burbank and Park City, says verticals “went from something that never happened to something that is probably representing somewhere in the neighborhood of 40 percent of the shoots” on his soundstages. He adds, “It may even be over 50 percent.”
Bailey co-founded the nonprofit CA United to incentivize more traditional film, television and commercial productions to return to the state. But he thinks L.A. shouldn’t discount the vertical market, given that it’s growing rather than shrinking. “I hope that Los Angeles and the greater Los Angeles area embrace this new medium, and we become the center of that media world as well,” he says. “I want to see crew members working. I want to see actors working.”
Alex Weprin contributed to this report.
This story appeared in the June 11 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.
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