Vertical Micro Drama Weekly: ReelShort starts buying IP and hiring real producers; Hollywood’s JV…
Week of Sept 21–28, 2025
ReelShort shifts from “make it in-house” to “license IP and commission traditional producers.”
C21 reported that ReelShort has put The Billionaire’s Fake Wife into development as its first Canadian-made micro-drama, adapting Hrishikesh Mukherjee’s 1980s Bollywood feature Kissi Se Na Kehna.
Jordan Pinto
What’s new isn’t the genre. It’s the workflow: the platform secured underlying rights, then handed script development and production to Vancouver’s Service Street Pictures (producer Sammie Astaneh) with Dom Cutrupi directing and Eric Bruce writing. Filming is scheduled to start this fall in Vancouver.
The package also surfaces a practical roster: executive producers include Sameer Sippy, Raghavendra Nagpal, Sahil Arya and Andy Chu, and slots into ReelShort’s North and Latin America push, which already includes a Spanish-language originals pact with Caracol Televisión.
ReelShort says it reaches more than 55 million monthly actives, a scale that starts to justify a buy-IP, hire-producers model rather than bootstrapped vertical shoots.
Hollywood infrastructure is arriving, and the mainstream business press is framing it that way.
Forbes just asked the question out loud:⇲
Can the micro-drama gold rush help a battered Hollywood?
The piece cites first-quarter 2025 industry revenue around $350 million and uses MicroCo, the new Cineverse/Banyan Ventures joint venture, as the proof point that serious commissioning power is entering the format.
MicroCo’s leadership reads like a network org chart: former Showtime president Jana Winograde as CEO and former NBCUniversal/Warner Bros. executive Susan Rovner joining as chief content officer. The JV positions itself as both a studio and an AI-native platform, projecting a market that could reach $10 billion by 2027.
A live-action interactive out of Asia shows how fast a two-track launch can compound.
New One Studio’s live-action interactive Road to Empress rolled out on Steam (Sept 8) with an English store presence and “100+ story branches,” while the iOS/Android versions arrived with a 16-chapter unlock model published by Sixjoy Hong Kong Limited, free opening chapters, paid progression after.
Within roughly 12 days, the team publicly celebrated “over 1,000,000 copies sold” across platforms; Twitch spun up a dedicated game directory, boosting discovery among streamers who thrive on choice-and-consequence clips.
