For one weekend in October, the AMC theater off of New York City’s Union Square wasn’t playing any recognizable new releases. Instead, it was closed to the general public, with the sidewalk outside taken over by a small red carpet covered by a white tent, where the occasional group of attractive actor types in suits and gowns got their photo taken. Inside, the bar offered a promotional cocktail; a merch stand downstairs sold exclusive baseball caps and tote bags. The attendees were there to watch screenings, but not of traditional wide-screen features: These films took up only a sliver of the screen, with a five-foot black space on either side.
This was the scene at the Alza Festival, the first major theatrical event in the United States devoted entirely to the microdrama format. Microdramas—also known as vertical dramas, or just “verticals”—are series created to be watched upright on phones (alza is Spanish for “rise,” as a cutesy nod to verticality). Typically running 60 to 90 minutes in total, these series are essentially feature-length projects split up into easily digestible, one-to-three-minute episodes. Their design mimics the mindless scrolling of consumers on platforms such as TikTok, and tries to compete with the usual rotation of person-on-the-street interviews and front-facing-camera confessionals.
Many microdramas are exceedingly mediocre; actors give wooden performances in clunky stories about warring werewolf clans or secret billionaires. Even so, the format—which first took off in China during the coronavirus pandemic—has grown into a global industry that is expected to generate $14 billion in revenue this year. The first few episodes of a series tend to be free, luring viewers onto apps that house microdramas; the rest of the story sits behind a paywall. Most of the revenue comes from subscriptions and other individual purchases that encourage users to keep watching. Many independent companies (and, more recently, conventional networks) are getting in on the boom, lending this nascent corner of the industry more legitimacy.
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At Alza, the future of entertainment was undoubtedly vertical. In addition to screenings of microdramas in their entirety, the schedule included industry panels that underlined the format’s value—for Hollywood, for brands, and for the next generation of stars. The fervor felt similar to that of a start-up: One panelist compared the speed of making a particular series to “building tracks as the train is moving”; the idea that shooting vertically should be seen as a creative challenge, not a limitation, also came up several times. But after spending two days immersed in the vertical world, I was left wondering whether the product the festival was so enthusiastically championing was a durable innovation or a lucrative dud.
Microdramas are still finding their stylistic footing, but they share some hallmarks. To keep viewers engaged with these bite-size clips, nearly every episode ends with a cliff-hanger. A master class on vertical storytelling included a slide on editing that explained: “Control the pace. Build emotion. Keep them swiping.” The writing that I considered too blunt or obvious was, I learned, effectively designed that way; producers worry that the moment a story is at all potentially confusing, viewers will lose interest. As another slide put it: “Clarity creates momentum. Make every second count.”
But building anticipation is hard when the cliff-hanger is always resolved in the next clip. Presenting microdramas in full at Alza meant the screen went black every few minutes to signal the end of an installment. I noticed how jarring this was during Reunion Island, a thriller co-produced by the cable channel Lifetime and Microhouse Films, which was co-founded by the actor Taye Diggs. (Diggs was in attendance, shaded under a large cream-colored hat.) The plot follows a group of unwitting reality-dating-show contestants who are tasked with completing mysterious, murderous challenges. This was one of the busier screenings I attended, and I found that the audience was mostly laughing—at the familiar riffs on good guys getting dumped and a character looking “terrible” because she’s dead, among others. But after 61 minutes, I was tired of the constant attempts at plot twists, which felt tedious instead of exhilarating.
Aside from the narrative structure, each microdrama must deal with the practical concerns that come with shooting vertically. Suggestions for aspiring creators during the master class included looking for “vertical architecture”—such as doorways, staircases, mirrors, and hallways—and paying attention to eyelines and the distance of faces in the frame.
The screen’s size also pushes directors to be flexible. Throughout Reunion Island, for example, the actors are staggered to create the illusion of depth. The entity behind the dangerous game the characters are forced to play appears to them on TVs and iPads; for those horizontal monitors to be seen in their entirety, these scenes had to be shot from afar. The result, though, for viewers, is awkward amounts of room at the top and bottom of the screen. I’d noticed these kinds of visual shortcomings before while watching microdramas on my phone, but when I wasn’t experiencing the smooth-brainedness of scrolling, they were even harder to ignore. The format’s ability to grab attention without demanding any critical engagement from its audience is probably its strongest asset.
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Ultimately, the constraints of the microdrama struck me as entirely unnecessary. Vertical social video rules the internet, thanks largely to TikTok—in that respect, microdramas are meeting viewers where they are. But people have been flipping their smartphone horizontally to watch videos for years, on streaming platforms including Netflix and YouTube. Are audiences now so intolerant to the friction of a simple hand movement that production companies must make such extreme adjustments? What’s more, formats tend to adapt as hardware changes; with a new iPhone on the market that unfolds to a wider display, how we watch media on our devices may soon evolve yet again.
Microdramas might have more potential staying power if they were more consistently good. I’ve been watching and keeping tabs on microdramas for roughly two years now, after hearing about them from a guy in my improv class, who had acted in one. Nothing at Alza elevated my opinion of them: One of the screenings I attended was basically a highlight reel of someone’s social-media archive, complete with Instagram watermarks. Another series included a scene during which you could clearly hear someone off-screen yell, “Cut—that’s good!”
When the festival announced the awards for categories such as Best Vertical Series, Best Director, and Best Performance, I realized I hadn’t seen a single winning entry. I wondered if I’d missed some obvious sign that RelationshiTs, which involved two sisters, murder, psychedelics, and a truth-telling serum, or Layover, a Las Vegas–set romance between a flight attendant and a risk manager, would be better than the rest of the lineup. But looking over the series on my watch list, I realized guessing the quality of a microdrama in advance—deciphering which nonsensical plotline could translate into a compulsively watchable story—is near impossible. They reminded me, in a way, of NFTs: The quality is good enough to gain a viewer’s attention, but not much else.
The last showing I attended was of a contemporary adaptation of Wuthering Heights, which very much reminded me of an assignment I had in high school to modernize scenes from Hamlet. A group of elderly patrons sat a few rows ahead of me, and seemed taken aback by the vertical nature of what they were about to watch. (Perhaps they saw a showing for Wuthering Heights listed somewhere and bought tickets.) Before the film started, they flagged down one of the theater attendants to ask about the Alza Festival information shown on-screen; the slides highlighted vertical storytelling and one of the sponsors, the app Verza TV. After the attendant dutifully explained what microdramas were, one of the patrons asked incredulously: “How does that apply to television?” It was a reminder that, as much hype as this slice of the entertainment industry gins up for itself, vertical dramas haven’t proved they’re more than a way to make a quick buck.