Lowbrow and vulgar? Microdramas shake up Chinese film industry, aim at Hollywood | World News

By Antoni Slodkowski

ZHENGZHOU, China — On a film set that resembles a medieval Chinese lord’s castle, Zhu Jian is busy shaking up the world’s second-largest film industry.

The 69-year-old actor plays the patriarch of a wealthy family celebrating his birthday with a lavish banquet. But unbeknownst to either of them, the servant in the scene is his biological granddaughter.

A second surprise: Zhu doesn’t film for movie screens.

“Grandma’s Moon” is a microdrama, composed of vertically filmed, minute-long episodes with frequent plot twists aimed at keeping millions of viewers glued to their mobile phones — and making them pay more.

“They don’t go to the movies anymore,” Zhu said of his audience, which he described as largely middle-aged workers and retirees. “It’s so convenient to hold a cell phone and watch something whenever you want.”

According to Reuters interviews with 10 industry people and four academics and media analysts, China’s microdrama industry is flourishing, generating annual revenues of $5 billion.

Some experts say the short videos are increasingly challenging China’s film industry, which is second only to Hollywood in size and dominated by state-owned China Film Group. And the trend is already spreading to the United States, in a rare case of Chinese cultural exports finding traction in the West.

According to analytics firm Appfigures, three major China-backed microdrama apps were downloaded 30 million times across both Apple’s App Store and Google Play in the first quarter of 2024, grossing $71 million internationally.

“Audiences only have so much attention span. So the more time they spend on short videos, the less time they have for TV or other longer format shows,” says Ashley Dudarenok, founder of a marketing consultancy in Hong Kong.

Leading the way in this sector is Kuaishou, an app that accounted for 60% of the top 50 Chinese microdramas last year, according to media analytics consultancy Endata.

Chen Yiyi, vice chairman of Kuaishou, said at a press conference in January that the app contained 68 titles that were viewed more than 300 million times last year, four of which were viewed more than a billion times.

About 94 million people — more than the population of Germany — watched more than 10 episodes a day on Kuaishou, she said. Reuters could not independently verify the data.

The first episodes are often free on such apps, but to finish a micro-drama like “Grandma’s Moon,” which consists of 64 clips, the audience sometimes has to pay tens of yuan.

Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok, owned by internet technology company Bytedance, is also popular among microdrama fans.

Alongside other major Chinese social media apps, such as Instagram-like Xiaohongshu and YouTube competitor Bilibili, the company has announced plans to create more.

In the United States, micro-drama platform ReelShort, whose parent company is backed by Chinese tech giants Tencent and Baidu, recently overtook Netflix in terms of downloads on Apple’s U.S. app store, according to market researcher Sensor Tower.

“China was the first to discover this audience,” said Layla Cao, a Chinese producer based in Los Angeles. “Hollywood hasn’t figured it out yet, but all the companies based in China are already feeding the content.”

‘LOW AND VULGARIAN’

Many popular microdramas, including Grandma’s Moon, have stories that revolve around revenge or Cinderella-like adventures from poverty to wealth.

Stories about how the circumstances of birth are defining and can only be changed by near-miracles have struck a chord with viewers at a time when social mobility in China is low and youth unemployment is high.

The microdramas often show “people who are lower class one day and upper class the next — you become so rich that you get to humiliate those who humiliated you before,” said a 26-year-old screenwriter who goes by her pseudonym Camille Rao.

Rao recently left her low-paying job as a junior producer in the traditional film industry for what she described as the more dynamic and less hierarchical world of microdramas. She now writes and edits scripts for the American market.

“Social mobility is actually very difficult now. Many people see this as a social reality,” said Xu Ting, an associate professor of Chinese language and literature at Jiangnan University.

This has fueled interest in stories about billionaires and wealthy families, she added: “Everyone desires power and wealth, so it’s natural that these kinds of stories are popular.”

In the U.S. market, on the other hand, fantasy stories about werewolves and vampires are particularly popular, several creators told Reuters.

The rise of microdramas in China has led to criticism from the Communist Party.

Between late 2022 and early 2023, the National Radio and Television Administration regulator launched a “special rectification campaign,” removing 25,300 microdramas, totaling nearly 1.4 million episodes, for their “pornographic, gory, violent, vulgar and vulgar content.”

While Chinese leader Xi Jinping promotes values ​​such as loyalty to the Communist Party and heteronormative marriages, the state-run China Women’s News complained in April that some microdramas “portray unequal and distorted marriages and family relationships as a common phenomenon” and “deviate from mainstream social values.”

In June, the government began requiring some creators to register microdramas with the NRTA. The regulator did not respond to Reuters’ inquiries for this story.

The key to these films’ commercial success is plot twists that keep people paying as they scroll while on the go or in line at a grocery store. Episodes often end on a hook — like a boyfriend catching his partner with another man — and viewers have to pay for the next episode to find out what happened.

“The plot of these microdramas is exaggerated,” said Zhu, the actor. “It has plot reversals, it’s nonsense, so it attracts people’s attention and a large audience wants to see them.”

Zhu is a cinema lover and an avid fan of Ingrid Bergman in “Casablanca.” Like many of his microdramatic colleagues, he thinks the genre has limited artistic value. “I see it as fast food: a longer drama is a kind of sumptuous meal, and a microdrama is fast food.”

But dedicated viewers disagree. Huang Siyi, a 28-year-old customer service representative, said she enjoyed watching romantic microdramas because “the acting is good and the male and female leads look good.”

“It’s easy to get obsessed with microdramas,” she said.

EXPLOSIVE GROWTH

Vertical filming and distribution via social media apps mean microdramas can be made with low overhead. Budgets for such films range from $28,000 to $280,000, according to market researcher iResearch.

In the central Chinese city of Zhengzhou, “Grandma’s Moon” is being shot on a compressed budget and timeline. When Reuters visited the set in July, the filming day lasted until 2 a.m. The crew then moved to a new location and resumed filming at 7 a.m.

Filming for the series lasted just six days and Zhu, a muscular man with a broad smile and boundless energy, says he plays table tennis after work to keep up with the young crew on set.

“It would take us two to three years to distribute one traditional TV series or movie, but for a microdrama we only need three months. That saves us a lot of time,” said Zhou Yi, showrunner at Chinese gaming giant NetEase, which also makes microdramas.

As microdramas have become more popular, actors’ salaries have also risen. Lead roles used to be paid $280 a day, Zhu said, adding that leading actors in large productions can now earn more than double that, while extras earn just $17 a day.

Zhu, a retired railway worker, began acting in the 1970s in a theatre company attached to the unit where he worked. He now lives on his pension and occasional acting work.

Many Chinese microdrama producers have their eyes set on Western markets, where cultural exports from China often struggle. NetEase began making productions for the US last year, which it distributes through an app called LoveShots; the films made for export are generally unavailable in China.

Microdramas designed for the West are often created by production and acting teams in Los Angeles and shot on location. The scripts, which are in English, can also revolve around themes of wealth, cheating partners and miracles.

One of the latest microdramas on LoveShots is about a woman who, after years of paralysis, miraculously regains her ability to move. She catches her husband cheating on her.

This article was generated from an automated feed from a news agency, with no changes to the text.