We’re in a new age of soap opera–one where all the drama, romance, and secret twin and/or baby reveals are packed into just 60 or 90 seconds of content posted on platforms like TikTok, YouTube Shorts, and Instagram.
Much akin to livestreamed shopping, which has become a dominant ecommerce force in China but is just catching on in the West, minidramas have been around on Chinese social media since 2018. These series have historically been produced by Chinese studios, and have classic, tropey plotlines like fake marriages and falling for the bad boy.
Per Bloomberg, early drivers were companies like Tencent and Kuaishou Technology. Their business model? Produce bite-size episodes for smallish five-figure budgets (eat your heart out, Quibi), distribute a few of them on social media sites like TikTok’s sister app Douyin, then redirect viewers to their own apps to watch their full slates of programming.
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These minidrama series (which can be single-episode one-shots that tell a complete story in a minute or a half, or can span dozens of episodes like TV soaps) have become wildly popular in China. Studios now produce between 5,000 and 8,000 new minidrama series a year, and Bloomberg reports that thanks to viewer spend and ad revenue, minidrama revenue jumped 35% from 2023 to 2024.
In 2024, the minidrama industry collectively made just shy of $7 billion in China, surpassing the country’s box office earnings.
Some of this revenue growth might also be thanks to Western enthusiasm for the shows. Minidramas found a new audience with American TikTok users over teh past few years, and now have attracted enough attention on the platform that both established Chinese studios and newer U.S.-based studios are eyeballing them as the potential next big thing in digital content.
Established Chinese studios are forming headquarters in the U.S., hiring American production teams and working with local studios to develop shows aimed at engaging U.S. viewers and give series a more Hollywood feel, Bloomberg reports. Dramas from these studios tend to involve actors who are bilingual and speak both English and Chinese, allowing for shows to be filmed in both languages.
Other short-form serialized content companies, like ReelShort, launched in the U.S. and are producing minidramas in English for an American audience. ReelShort is operated by Sunnyvale, Calif.-based Crazy Maple Studios, and says it has more than 10 million users watching in the U.S. It’s currently expanding into Latin America, Europe, and the Asia-Pacific region, and is building a library of shows in 16 languages.
It produced one of the most popular minidramas on TikTok and YouTube in 2023, The Double Life of My Billionaire Husband. The first part of the series has over 22 million views on YouTube.
“I see mini dramas becoming a dominant form of entertainment, potentially even outpacing the traditional film market in a few years,” Joey Jia, ReelShort’s CEO, told Bloomberg.
Is ReelShort what Quibi aspired to be? Can minidramas truly take off with U.S. viewers? That remains to be seen—but both Eastern and Western studios are betting big money on it.
