All this happens in a minute and a half. It's the entire first episode of Snatched a Billionaire to Be My Husband, a new series on the Chinese-backed short-form video app ReelShort, which contains dozens of shows — similarly highlighting character development and full of cliffhangers — designed for binge-watching. In minutes. It's part soap opera, part TikTok, and all heavy drama.
ReelShort is the latest app to follow in TikTok's footsteps, aiming to bring an entertainment model popular in China to a global audience. Despite the hackneyed plots, unknown actors, and confusing plotlines — not to mention all the real-life drama surrounding the popularity of Chinese apps like TikTok, Shein, and Temu — Americans are flocking to the service.
Joey Jia, CEO of Crazy Maple Studio, the company behind ReelShort, said its target viewers are busy middle-aged American women looking for romance and fantasy.
Crazy Maple Studio was founded by Jia, a Chinese tech industry veteran, and Beijing-based digital content company COL, to take these ultra-short dramas to the international market.
The Chinese-backed app knocked TikTok off the top spot in Apple's App Store's entertainment category several times in November, and it has remained in the top 10 since then, according to data from mobile data analytics firm Sensor Tower. ReelShort has surpassed 30 million downloads worldwide, 40 percent of which came from the United States, Jia said.
While some people mocked the corny novels, Jia bet they would be a hit because many of them are taken directly from popular romance stories on Crazy Maple Studio's other platforms, which include the interactive story game Chapters and the web novel reader Kiss.
In the age of prestige TV, when Netflix spends upwards of $14 million per episode on hit series like The Crown, short-form shows on ReelShort and other Chinese apps like GoodShort and DramaBox keep production costs to an absolute minimum. It cost less than $300,000 to create the entire ReelShort offering from start to finish, Jia said. There are no expensive sets or serene luxury wardrobe, just romantic tension, scandal and betrayal.
“You need the conflicts up front, to simplify the characters, and not focus on the character arc,” Jia said. “We make vertical video, so people don't care about the background.”
Although other attempts to attract long-form TV advertising have failed in the US – notably the high-profile launch of short-form video platform Quibi In 2020 – Small dramas made for streaming on smartphones have become a multi-billion dollar industry in China. The concept took off while movie theaters were closed during the coronavirus pandemic, and has been particularly popular among workers who may only have a few minutes of downtime between gigs such as driving delivery.
Oscar Zhu, a researcher at the University of Kent in Britain who studies the industry, said the trend of short dramas is already redefining China's film and television industry. One screenwriter he interviewed was asked to fit three plot twists into every minute they appeared on screen. “It's not about the story, it's about redefining the process of telling a story,” he said.
In Hengdian, the center of China's film industry, many production studios have turned their attention to producing short dramas. Fu Yicong, a short drama director and screenwriter, said as many as 300 different crews might go out to film short dramas around Hengdian, south of Shanghai, on any given day.
Film crews in Hengdian are cutting out a lot of the intensive production that was used in traditional films and television, Fu said. Instead, they focus on scale, filming a 100-episode series in one week.
“If you leave your artist pride at home and embrace minimalism, there is a good chance you can make big money,” Fu said.
There's another factor: The Chinese government's ongoing scrutiny of the tech industry has led many of these companies to look abroad.
China's largest technology companies have sought to make new Chinese internet trends — from live streaming to discounted bulk purchases — popular in other markets, partly as a hedge against growing risks in the domestic market, where the government has repeatedly shown it is willing to stamp them out. Billions from valuations of local technology companies to curb their influence.
Although China's short-drama market is booming — last year worth more than $5 billion, according to Chinese analytics firm iiMedia Research — short-drama companies are wary they will become the next target.
One Chinese production company, Xi'an Fengxing Culture, produced eight series of the same number Months before he won gold in February last year with The Knockout, a 108-episode drama series in which an underdog bank employee travels back in time to prevent his mother's murder and take revenge on his cheating girlfriend. The following year, Fengxing produced 17 more successful shows, including the costume drama “Unparalleled,” which grossed $16 million over just eight days in August.
But after the erotic series Fengxing was censored for being too steamy, CEO Li Tao decided to look for audiences outside China.
They are now filming a show in Egypt for the local market, and are in talks to pitch a show for ReelShort where the actors must speak “impeccable American English,” Lee told me.
But pitching to the US market comes with its own set of challenges. They probably don't have to worry about censorship as much as they do in China, but they should consider more stringent copyright and intellectual property rights protections — and lawmakers' explicit concern about how Chinese tech companies handle American users' data.
Jia was already aware of this level of scrutiny. Years before founding Crazy Maple Studio, he was part of a US-based team for Chinese telecom giant ZTE, which was sanctioned beginning in 2017 for violating US embargoes on equipment sales to North Korea and Iran.
Jia said he's not worried that ReelShort will come under the same microscope. Crazy Maple Studio is headquartered in Sunnyvale, California, and says it has no audience in China. However, it has an office in Shenzhen and is still 49 percent owned by Beijing-based COL. (Gia owns the rest.)
At the very least, Jia expects the company's growth to see fewer ups and downs than the “Snatched a Billionaire” story. Over the course of the next ten minutes of the show, the heroine's mother wakes up from a coma and her handsome ex-uncle gives her $50,000. Receiving insults, accusations and multiple punches.
“When they first saw the app, some people said, 'I can't believe someone would pay for this,'” Jia said. “Our answer is: Do you think you understand the entire entertainment market? It was not.”
