I have met the 21st-century Roger Corman and her name is Yun Xie. She’s an award-winning filmmaker who’s part of a team that cranks out perhaps a half-dozen nonunion movies a month, giving opportunities to fresh film grads as well as industry veterans adrift in a changing industry. She and her partners in Narval Films are ambitious, with plans to ramp up production to 120 per year; they may launch their own platform.
And this is all in service to a format that can never be seen in theaters: the vertical drama.
For the uninitiated, vertical dramas are full-length features shot in 9:16, designed for mobile-only viewing on platforms like ReelShort and MyDrama. China launched the format in 2020, filling the theatrical void of the Covid pandemic; in 2024 it generated nearly $7 billion in annual revenue, outperforming the country’s theatrical box office.
Films are presented in very short chapters — 60, 70, 80, or more, each ending with a cliffhanger designed to make you eager to swipe for the next one. Like any addictive product, the first one’s free; once you’re hooked, you have to pay and it may make you hate yourself in the morning.
Viewers buy digital coins to unlock new chapters, a stroke of gamification that can obscure the fact you’ve just paid $20 for an absurd melodrama that contains the line “Looks like pool ain’t your sport, city girl. Let me help you with your position.” (The dramas don’t stray past PG-13.)
The number of vertical dramas produced lie in the thousands, generating billions of views. And they all have one thing in common: By any traditional measure, these are not good movies.
From the lighting to the dialogue to the character names that appear on screen next to the burned-in, same-language subtitles, every element of a vertical drama is digitally calibrated to be thuddingly obvious. Their titles and thumbnail images resemble Harlequin Novels in concentrate, with titles like “Surrender to My Professor,” “Royal Heir Breaks My Heart in a Warzone,” and “The Alpha King and His Virgin Bride.”
Xie directed her first vertical drama for ReelShort, “I Got Married Without You,” in October 2023, not long after the Chinese studios expanded to American markets. Born in China, she studied at Shanghai Theater Academy before emigrating to the U.S. in 2014 to attend the School of Visual Arts in New York.
She’d just made her first film, “Under the Burning Sun” (which went on to win the Audience Award for Best Narrative Feature at Slamdance this year). And she was broke.
“I wasn’t excited about it,” she said over a weekend breakfast in Downtown Los Angeles. “I just needed the paycheck. It felt weird. I had just made this deeply personal film about bodily autonomy, about a woman who travels across borders seeking an abortion. And then I was directing a vertical drama with a line like, ‘Would you still love me, even though I’m not pure? I gave my virginity to him.’
“One day I was giving direction and I heard this voice: ‘Listen to you. What are you talking about?’ I swear I heard it,” she said. “That’s when I knew I needed a break.”
That, she thought, would be her first and last vertical drama experience. But then Xie kept getting messages from other vertical drama studios. “I Got Married Without You” generated 60 million views; was she sure she wouldn’t like to make another?
“That first one paid me about $7,000 to $8,000 for eight or nine days of work,” she said. “After that, more offers started coming in, with people offering as much as $20,000 for similar timelines — nine days, maybe even less.”
Still, she wasn’t into it. Beyond the content, the production didn’t feel good. Friends still working in vertical dramas said the same. “They hated the ecosystem, too. They just think people don’t even need to be fed on set? I thought, ‘Maybe we should try doing it ourselves.’”
With their friends’ encouragement, she and Narval partners Aaron Yu and Jera Wang began producing their own vertical dramas for the Chinese studios in May 2024. Since then, they’ve produced nearly 30 in Los Angeles and are now prepping Narval’s first Canadian production. As independent producers, they work with eight or nine studios like DramaBox, GoodShort, and MiniShorts.
“Some of them have started signing longer-term deals with us,” she said. “The only way to make it sustainable as a company is to scale up. A lot of smaller outfits try to squeeze budgets for more profit. They’ll cut corners. But we can’t do that. These are our friends. We’re not going to underpay them or send them to shoot in sketchy locations. So we decided if we can’t shrink the budget, maybe we grow the operation. Do more productions. Build something that’s sustainable not because it’s super profitable, but because it creates steady work and pays people fairly.”
Average budgets lie somewhere between $150,000-$200,000. Production is breakneck, shooting 12-15 pages across a 12-hour day; it takes about two months to go from script to a movie available for swiping. And while, like Corman, these productions provide opportunities for recent film school graduates, Xie said she’s been surprised to find a number of collaborators with years of experience.
“Some of the directors we collaborate with have worked at Disney or Hulu,” she said. “One of them recently left HBO. These are experienced people trying to find their footing again in a changing industry and they’re now learning to adapt to this new format. We’re building something with them.”
Xie remains keenly aware that her vertical dramas are mass-production entertainment that eschew all subtlety, targeting housewives who fantasize that “I Became Mrs. Grayson by Bragging” or “One Fateful Night With My Boss” could be their story.
“It’s funny, I feel like I’m living a double life,” she said. “On one hand, I’m running these high-output vertical shoots. On the other, I’m prepping my next feature, which I’m co-writing with a writer I met through a vertical. They turned out to be really good.” Narval also invested in two short films last year.
“We’re always trying to do more to support indie filmmakers,” she said. “In the beginning, I thought I was only doing verticals for money. I didn’t know how long I could keep it up. It wasn’t a lot of money, and I didn’t feel particularly inspired by the work. But eventually, I found meaning in it.
“We’re living a more stable life than we did as independent filmmakers,” said Xie. “And honestly, since we started doing verticals, we’ve never been more productive.”
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