Microdrama Producers Voice Cautious Optimism on the Sector Despite AI Worries

Hollywood was slow to break into microdramas, but the major studios and streamers are there now.

“In the first year, I feel like we were constantly explaining what this is. Oh, it’s not that. It’s this. It’s actually a lot bigger than you realize,” Austin Herring, CEO of Snow Story Productions, said of early conversations around microdramas at the Access Canada Summit, powered by The Hollywood Reporter, on Tuesday. “This past year has been the year that Hollywood is really making those moves.”

Herring added production in microdramas is booming, while elsewhere in Hollywood production spending is in decline. “We make verticals, and it’s like slinging cheeseburgers. We make 10 cents a cheeseburger, but if you sell enough cheeseburgers, it is a lot better to have a McDonald’s than to own steak restaurants,” he argued.

And as Peacock, Warner Bros. and Netflix get into microdramas, there’s a diversification in genres for phone-focused dramas away from early soaps and romancers. What’s more, microdrama apps are moving away from a paywall model as many start to get more revenue from subscriptions.

And that’s allowed microdramas to get into comedy, for example, to follow YouTube Shorts and Instagram Reels. Jeffrey Schenck, founder VertTV, a Los Angeles-based microdrama studio, has done over 200 TV movies for Lifetime and Hallmark in the past, and sees bite-sized dramas as the new small screen in people’s lives.

“I see it in the vein where TV can go and is going and should be,” Schenck told the panel during the Toronto Film Festival. Herring somewhat disagreed, insisting emerging microdramas represented more than TV, which has got more premium of late, and more what the medium was decades ago.

“It’s kind of that just dumb fun type of thing that we used to get a little more of from TV,” Herring, a prolific microdrama producer, argued.

With the major studios and streamers focused on sports and live action, and content producers in China focused on generative AI, the panel considered whether bite-sized, AI-generated stories could be the canary in the coal mine for vertical dramas. Of late, the booming sector of verticals has been inundated with AI-generated titles.

“I hope not,” Schenck said. “Nothing against AI. It’s part of our life, I know. But there’s something about the energy on set. What actors bring and what writers bring and what directors do, yes, but what humans contribute is so nuanced.” Schenck argued actors, writers and directors bring a vital “energy” to film sets and are required beyond AI tools.