ReelShort

Microdrama Platform

3years oldFounded August, 2022

The biggest Western microdrama app, run by Crazy Maple Studio and backed by China’s COL Group. Its CEO says AI has cut production costs by about 90% and that a pure businessman would drop live-action today — while insisting ReelShort will keep hiring humans.

Company Organization Entertainment Microdrama

Wikipedia reelshort.com

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 their words

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.

— Joey Jia, Deadline, 2026

Biography

ReelShort is the app that brought the Chinese duanju format to Western phones. Launched in August 2022 by Crazy Maple Studio, the US arm of Beijing-listed digital publisher COL Group, it streams vertical series told in one-to-two-minute episodes across 70–80-episode seasons, with the first few free and the rest sold by coin or pass. By mid-2026 it reported around 70 million monthly active users, more than 286 million downloads, roughly 600 in-house titles and 4,000 licensed ones, and $1.2 billion in consumer spending in a year.

A 90% cost cut, and what it implies

CEO Joey Jia has been unusually candid about what generative tools did to his cost structure. Crazy Maple went from making a series for $60,000 to struggling to make one for $250,000–$300,000; AI tools, he told Deadline in June 2026, cut costs by about 90% over the previous year. Two weeks earlier, at Owl & Co.’s Vertical Media Summit, he gave the audience the blunt version.

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.

— Joey Jia, TheWrap, 2026

He stopped short of doing it: ReelShort “cannot stop making live-action,” he said, describing a hybrid model in which AI handles pre-vis, sets, backgrounds, and compositing while humans write and act. The same cheapening, though, arms every rival — his own point about competing with everybody.

Before, when you were producing content in Hollywood, your competitors were all mature, high-end studios, but with AI, all of a sudden you realize that everybody has the potential to make vertical dramas to a high standard. You basically have to compete with everybody.

— Joey Jia, Deadline, 2026

Where its own talent objects

ReelShort’s performers have felt the other edge. Jen Parkhill, who directed the queer hit “Poolboy,” watched the app release “Under the Surface” — an anime version with an identical plot and description — and called for profit sharing and creator-owned IP; cast and viewers protested on social media. Earlier, actor Tess Dinerstein found an AI-made promo for her ReelShort series “How to Tame a Silver Fox” that cut to a sex scene never filmed; she told Business Insider the company said the ad came from “the Beijing team” and then took it down. ReelShort did not respond to that publication’s requests for comment.

The company is expanding rather than retrenching — carriage deals with telcos in Thailand and the Philippines, a content partnership with Korea’s Showbox, and local-language remakes in Brazil, Mexico, and Colombia — which makes it the clearest test of whether an AI-heavy production line can scale without losing the performers it was built on. Rivals GoodShort and MoboReels have run the same experiment more quietly.