If you haven’t heard of vertical dramas, chances are you will soon. These quick, grabby series – usually split into minute-long episodes – have risen unstoppably over the past couple of years, and now Hollywood is taking an interest.
Last year, the former Showtime executive Jana Winograde announced MicroCo, a studio devoted to vertical drama, and claimed that she was shocked by the amount of top-tier talent that has approached her. Two months before, former Miramax boss Bill Block launched GammaTime, which promises original microdramas by CSI creator Anthony E Zuiker.
“Every single Hollywood studio you can think of is involved or trialling,” says vertical drama consultant Jen Cooper. “For actors in America, 90% of the jobs are verticals.” Indeed, in a stagnating entertainment market, verticals are one of the few places of real growth – last year Deadline reported that revenues in the sector are up 8,000% year-on-year.
Vertical dramas get their name from the fact they’re filmed in 9:16 format: they are taller than they are wide, making them perfect for smartphone viewing. They’re typically shot fast, in around a week, by small crews and actors who are expected to nail their performances in a couple of takes. And, because their job is to keep you watching (ideally to the point where you start paying for them, more on which later), they have a tendency to crack along at an incredible pace. Imagine a film that pivots from cliffhanger to cliffhanger every 90 seconds and you get the idea.
“They have obviously mastered the clickbait and the hooks that get you past the paywall,” says Cooper. “But the reason it’s gone so big is that it’s serving a massively underserved audience, which is women who read romance novels. You might watch them and think, ‘This is not The Godfather – this is bizarre,’ but then you look at romance novels and you’re like, ‘Ah, right, OK.’ It’s serving all that audience that couldn’t find anything anywhere else. And it meets people where they are, which is on their phone. People pay more attention to verticals because they’re not also on WhatsApp at the same time.”
But are they any good? If you download a vertical app, such as the Chinese-owned ReelShort or DramaBox, you’ll find yourself overwhelmed with berserk titles such as (and I promise these are real) My Sister Is the Warlord Queen and Ms CEO’s Baby Daddy Is the Merchant of Death. Everyone in these films is a billionaire. Most people are horny. It’s like being lost at sea watching them.
This being so, I ask Cooper to supply me with some verticals that show where the industry is right now. Here’s what she suggests …
Breaking the Ice
ReelShort
“This went supernova and brought in a lot of new watchers, especially in areas like Indonesia and the Philippines,” says Cooper. And, since it’s about a sexy ice hockey star, it’s worth pointing out that it predates Heated Rivalry. Breaking the Ice is the story of an up-and-coming player who leaves his childhood sweetheart behind, not knowing that she is pregnant, before returning eight years later.
It is absolutely bananas. Within the first minute, the female lead discovers she’s pregnant, then gets slapped by her boyfriend’s mother, who offers her thousands of dollars to break up with him. In the second minute, she’s called a “crazy bipolar bitch” for kissing someone else. Halfway through, a kidnapping is initiated and resolved in the space of about 45 seconds. There are countless one-punch fights, to a wildly overblown musical score. It’s frantic, tonally all over the place and makes almost no sense. The precision with which Breaking the Ice can weaponise a low attention span is frightening. It is also stupidly entertaining.
However, as soon as there’s a shower scene, the paywall kicks in. This might be where people get turned off. To keep watching, you have to amass coins, as you would in a mobile game. You can do this by watching an advert (usually for Temu) every couple of minutes, or by buying 1,000 coins for £4.49. You could also buy a subscription to the app, which costs about £200 a year. This is more expensive than either a standard Netflix subscription or the licence fee, but Cooper says that for many viewers, verticals are “a fan thing. If they were into live music, or sport, or buying wool for their knitting, they’d be spending the same amount.”
How to Tame a Silver Fox
ReelShort
Buoyed up by my unexpected enjoyment of Breaking the Ice, I try this, described by Cooper as an age-gap romance that has gone viral on TikTok. It is, by all accounts, slightly harder to enjoy.
How to Tame a Silver Fox is a slightly grim love story about a girl falling for her dad’s friend. The main issue I have is that her dad’s friend is an absolute cluster-bomb of red flags. He drives a sports car. He carries a gun. He wears a leather jacket and has a teddy boy haircut. His shirt, which is perpetually half undone and soaking wet, keeps getting taken off and put back on with no real logic. He keeps saying things (to his friend’s daughter, remember) like “You’re a beautiful woman but I’m too much for you, kid,” and “You had better not test me or I’ll break you.” Worst of all, he isn’t actually a silver fox, just a brown-haired man who seems to have Pepé Le Pewed himself with talcum powder. Not my cup of tea in the slightest, but there’s a good chance I’m not the target audience here.
American Sniper: The Last Round
ReelShort
Cooper describes this one as “a big hit near the end of the year, and part of the attempt to bring in a male audience”. Which is great, because I am a man. This one should be a slam dunk.
Except it isn’t, because the more I watch American Sniper: The Last Round, the more I become convinced that nobody in the vertical drama industry has ever met a man. Within the first five seconds, someone gets shot in the head. We meet a guy with the nickname the King of Guns, which we know because they call him the King of Guns approximately once every 30 seconds. Every scene is accompanied by music that sounds as if it was pirated from a pickup truck commercial. Also, very importantly, this has nothing to do with Clint Eastwood’s film American Sniper. That was about Chris Kyle, a decorated Navy Seal sniper eventually murdered at a shooting range. This is about the King of Guns, a guy who leaves his military post to work at a shooting range, then shoots a load of baddies. It is profoundly dumb, like the sort of thing you’d watch drunk at 2am.
Spark Me Tenderly
My Drama
Cooper calls this one “Fifty Shades of Grey rubbish, but a massive hit”, which is accurate. The success of Spark Me Tenderly comes from a blanket social media push full of TikTok videos that make it look like pornography. It is not that, but it is extremely Fifty Shadesy. A young woman gets a job with a handsome pervert who makes her sign a BDSM contract. There’s a brief battle of wills and some fully clothed heavy petting, and (spoiler alert) it ends with the pervert setting his kink aside because he’s fallen in love, and the woman getting really into BDSM. A bit like Grease, then, without the flying car. Absolute tosh, but there is an enormous audience who would lap this up.
In Other Words, I Love You
DramaBox
“This is one of my all-time favourite verticals,” says Cooper, and I’m inclined to agree. This is a YA story about a poor American scholarship student who gets sent to a posh British school and butts heads with an arrogant British guy, and it feels the direction verticals should probably start heading if they want to shake off their clickbaity reputation.
For a start, the young and largely British cast do extremely well with the material, which isn’t always the case with verticals. Second, the bizarre need to send the plot spinning off in a silly new direction has been flattened out, so it feels like an actual film rather than a procession of interstitial YouTube ads. Early on, there is a long scene where the characters critique the work of William Golding. This is a vertical that knows and trusts its audience, which a lot of these things seem petrified to do. As a result we’re left with something lightweight, but extremely well made. Now that actual film-makers are getting involved with the medium, this will be the benchmark against which all other verticals are measured. A joy.
Game of Choice
Tallflix
Described by Cooper as “one of the most ambitious verticals,” this is an action drama in the mould of Squid Game. And by that I mean that it is exactly Squid Game, squeezed into a couple of hours and done on the cheap. However, by verticals standards it represents a huge leap forward. There are stunts and action scenes, and the story relies more on internal drama than ridiculous cliffhangers. It is gripping, and the perfect demonstration of a medium desperate to break out and become mainstream. When you’re all watching vertical dramas by the end of the year, it’ll be in part thanks to this.
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