Joey Jia
CEO of Crazy Maple Studio
Founder and CEO of Crazy Maple Studio, the company behind ReelShort. He says AI cut his production costs by roughly 90% and that a pure businessman would abandon live-action today — then argues against doing it, because he does not think AI can write a story.
Why this score
How the formula works →- +2.8proUses AI in their work
- +2.7proHas published AI-made work
- +1.4pro3 pro-AI statements (forceful)
- ±0nuancedHolds a documented two-sided view
Weights, statement counts, the ×1.25 multiplier for having a stake in an AI-impacted field, and the formula’s smoothing are already baked in — the points add up to the score (direction-free evidence pulls toward the middle instead): Strongly Pro-AI · 6.9/10
In his words
The AI consumer will be the early adopter and will be the core users of the future microdrama algorithms.
Biography
Joey Jia is the founder and chief executive of Crazy Maple Studio, the US arm of Beijing-listed publisher COL Group, and the person most responsible for exporting the Chinese duanju format to Western phones. ReelShort, which he launched in August 2022, reached roughly 70 million monthly active users and more than 286 million downloads by mid-2026, with $1.2 billion in consumer spending in a year — making Jia the closest thing the microdrama business has to a mogul.
The most candid CFO math in the format
Jia has been franker than any Hollywood executive about what generative video does to a budget. Crazy Maple went from producing a whole series for $60,000 to struggling to make one for $250,000–$300,000; AI tools, he told Deadline in June 2026, then cut costs by about 90%. Weeks earlier, at the Vertical Media Summit, he told a room of investors and studio executives where that logic ends if you follow it.
If I’m 100% a businessman, I would stop live-action today, because AI response for market is way better than live-action. We rely on independent and talented freelancers to create a story, but AI will definitely improve the efficiency of producing this content.
He declined to follow it. ReelShort “cannot stop making live-action,” he said, committing to a hybrid in which AI builds sets, backgrounds, pre-vis, and compositing while people write and perform. His stated reason is a limit he thinks the models still have.
I don’t believe AI can write a great story. But it can help us with pre-vis, creating sets, background, compositing, help us to make a different kind of story. If I want to build a car racing scene in Montana, then boom here you go, I can even make a story that is set on Mars.
The commitment is being tested from inside his own platform. ReelShort released an AI anime version of the queer hit “Poolboy,” prompting its director Jen Parkhill to demand profit sharing and creator-owned IP, and actor Tess Dinerstein said an AI-made promo for her ReelShort series showed a sex scene she never filmed — the company blamed “the Beijing team” and pulled it. Jia has also noted the flipside of cheap production: with AI, he says, everybody can compete with everybody.
Quote sources
- TheWrap, 2026(thewrap.com)
- Deadline, 2026(deadline.com)
Sources & further reading
Canonical record: https://battlelines.ai/topic/joey-jia
