When Albee Zhang received an offer last spring to produce short-form features for phones, she was skeptical, so she declined.
But the offers kept coming. Eventually, Ms. Zhang, who has been a producer for 12 years, realized it could be a profitable new way of storytelling and said yes.
Since last summer, she has created two short-form features and is working on four more for several apps that create content aimed at women.
Consider: The Lifetime movie split into TikTok videos. Think: soap opera, but for the short attention span of the internet age.
The biggest player in this new genre is ReelShort, an app that offers melodramatic content in minute-long, vertically shot episodes and hopes to bring a successful formula established overseas to the United States by attracting millions of people to its short-form content.
ReelShort is owned by Crazy Maple Studio, a Northern California company backed by Beijing-based digital publisher COL Group.
ReelShort credits include “The Double Life of My Billionaire Husband,” “I Got Married Without You” and “Bound by Vendetta: Sleeping With the Enemy.” The shows are typical: The plots involve romance and revenge, the characters are archetypal, and the dialogue is simple.
The ultra-short genre became popular in the Asia-Pacific region during the pandemic, and Joey Jia, the CEO of Crazy Maple Studio, took note.
ReelShort aims to hook people as quickly as possible, with much of the action happening in the first super short episodes. “This is a payment model,” Mr. Jia said. “If people get confused by the story, they leave.”
The cost to make these features is relatively low, $300,000 or less, according to Crazy Maple Studios. The crews are small and made up in part of recent film graduates in Los Angeles, according to actors who worked on the productions.
Viewers can watch dozens of minute-long episodes on ReelShort for free across multiple platforms, including YouTube and TikTok. But at some point, they have to either pay or watch ads to unlock the next episodes.
Sometimes people pay as much as $10 or $20 to keep watching, said Ms. Zhang, the producer. “Isn’t that a crazy job?”
In December, Mr. Jia told the Wall Street Journal that the company already had $22 million in revenue.
In the United States, ReelShort is trying to succeed where short-form content company Quibi failed. Quibi launched in early 2020 and shut down that year, in part because of what founder Jeffrey Katzenberg called bad timing: The app offered five- to 10-minute videos of news and entertainment for people on the go, just as people stopped they go anywhere. due to pandemic lockdowns.
And while Quibi focused on more intense content with A-list stars, ReelShort is doing the opposite: giving people juicy plot points, from werewolves to evil stepmothers to secret billionaire spouses to more werewolves.
“We learned a lot from Quibi,” said Mr. Jia, the Crazy Maple Studio executive. ReelShort isn’t trying to appeal to everyone like Quibi tried to do, he added.
“To build a successful mobile app, you need to discover your core audience,” he said. And that audience is women who love soap operas. (ReelShort’s audience is about 75 percent female, Mr. Jia said.)
Mr Jia said he was not trying to compete with streamers such as Netflix. If you’re free to sit on your couch for a few hours, ReelShort probably isn’t the app you open. It’s for those in-between moments: at a bus stop, in the bathroom.
“We use a very different business model,” Mr. Jia said, “and we serve a different time.”
ReelShort is hardly the first app owned or partially owned by a Chinese company to enter the United States. TikTok and shopping apps Shein and Temu have been among the most downloaded in recent months on Apple’s US app store.
But for TikTok, which is owned by Chinese company ByteDance, that was problematic. Lawmakers in the United States, Europe and Canada have raised concerns that TikTok and its parent company could put people’s sensitive personal information in the hands of the Chinese government and have worked to limit access to the wildly popular app. ReelShort hasn’t faced the same kind of pressure.
Last month, ReelShort was downloaded one million times and earned $5 million in revenue in Apple’s app store, according to data firm Sensor Tower, and was downloaded three million times in the Google Play Store, earning $3 million in revenue there. As of November, ReelShort ranks somewhere in the top 15 most popular entertainment apps on both app stores most days. (For a few days in November, ReelShort even surpassed TikTok as the most popular entertainment app in Apple’s app store.)
In total, more than seven million people downloaded ReelShort in the United States in 2023, on Apple and Android phones combined, according to data.ai. Worldwide, there were more than 24 million downloads last year. After the United States, India is ReelShort’s next largest market, followed by the Philippines.
Kasey Esser, a Los Angeles-based actor who has worked on short-form shows for ReelShort and other apps, described the format as this generation’s soap opera. He drew a comparison to channels with made-for-TV content such as Hallmark.
“People know exactly the story they’re going to get, but they’re still going to watch it,” Mr. Esher, 34, said. “They’ll still love it.”
For actress Samantha Drews, ReelShort was an opportunity to play different types of characters. “I can say now that I’ve been cast in 15 to 16 films in the last few years,” Ms Drews, 25, said. “That’s not something every actor can say.”
Camille James Harman, 57, had a supporting role in the 2018 film Vice, the Dick Cheney biopic starring Christian Bale that received multiple Oscar nominations. But she said she got much more of a response for her lead role as an evil stepmother in the 2023 ReelShort production “The Double Life of My Billionaire Husband.”
Other apps with names that are still unfamiliar to many — Sereal+, ShortTV, DramaBox, FlexTV — began producing such features, hoping to capitalize on ReelShort’s formula.
The amount of new titles coming out on these platforms is greater than that of many traditional streaming services. And if it’s up to Mr. Jia, that will continue in 2024: “The goal this year is to give another 100 titles,” he said.
As ReelShort pulls its content, the quality of the productions is improving, said Leomax He, who directed three productions for the app last year. Some downloads now use a stunt or affinity moderator.
“Budgets have gotten bigger, cameras are better, crews are getting bigger,” said Mr. He, 27.
Major studios have yet to jump into the genre, but some actors and filmmakers speculated that American companies would soon start creating their own short-form content.
“That’s why I do so many of them,” said Mr. Esher, the actor. “It’s a unique opportunity to be the first known of them in the US”
