[Source: Reuters]

On a film set that resembles the medieval castle of a Chinese lord, Zhu Jian is busy disrupting the world’s second-largest movie industry.

The 69-year-old actor is playing the patriarch of a wealthy family celebrating his birthday with a lavish banquet. But unbeknownst to either of them, the servant in the scene is his biological granddaughter.

A second twist: Zhu is not filming for cinema screens.

“Grandma’s Moon” is a micro drama, composed of vertically shot, minute-long episodes featuring frequent plot turns designed to keep millions of viewers hooked to their cellphone screens – and paying for more.

“They don’t go to the cinema anymore,” said Zhu of his audience, which he described as largely composed of middle-aged workers and pensioners. “It’s so convenient to hold a mobile phone and watch something anytime you want.”

China’s $5 billion a year micro drama industry is booming, according to Reuters’ interviews with 10 people in the sector and four scholars and media analysts.

The short-format videos are an increasingly potent competitor to China’s film industry, some experts say, which is second in size only to Hollywood and dominated by state-owned China Film Group. And the trend is already spreading to the United States, in a rare instance of Chinese cultural exports finding traction in the West.

Three major China-backed micro-drama apps were downloaded 30 million times across both Apple’s App Store and Google Play in the first quarter of 2024, grossing $71 million internationally, according to analytics company Appfigures.

“The audience only has that much attention. So obviously, the more time they spend in short videos, the less time they have for TV or other longer format shows,” said Ashley Dudarenok, founder of a Hong Kong-based marketing consultancy.

The leader in the space is Kuaishou, an app that accounted for 60% of the top 50 Chinese micro dramas last year, according to media analytics consultancy Endata.

Kuaishou vice president Chen Yiyi said at a media conference in January that the app featured 68 titles that notched more than 300 million views last year, with four of them watched over a billion times.

Some 94 million people – more than the population of Germany – watched more than 10 episodes a day on Kuaishou, she said. Reuters was not able to independently verify the data.