Welcome to The Vertical Bloom, a weekly dive into the fast-growing world of microseries and vertical storytelling. Here, we unpack the platforms, creators, and deals shaping the format that’s redefining what it means to make and watch scripted content in the mobile age.

This week, Disney lays out an ambitious plan for vertical content, YouTube and Meta rethink how audiences watch episodic storytelling, and a familiar group of 90210 stars makes the jump into microdramas.

But first, a little something from Scott about a very familiar candy bar.

Sometimes You Just Want a Snickers Bar

by Scott Brown

I had a really interesting meeting recently with someone who gave me what might be my new favorite analogy for the creative ethos we’re all chasing in digital storytelling.

He likened it to a Snickers bar.

What is a Snickers bar? It’s peanuts, caramel, nougat (which I had to quickly consult Wikipedia to remind myself what exactly nougat is), and chocolate. Put it all together, and you get a very specific taste. An experience we know the moment our taste buds communicate with our brain.

There’s a mouthfeel to it, as this person put it.

When someone wants a Snickers bar, they don’t want a cheesecake covered in nougat, caramel, peanuts, and chocolate. They want a Snickers bar.

He told me about some attempts he’d been involved with as an investor and producer in scripted digital media. As much as he’d wanted each one to work, unfortunately, none had been successful.

And I told him that I understood. In fact, I think that until this particular moment we’re living in, one that’s been brewing for the last several years, you were almost guaranteed to fail at that endeavor.

But today is different.

The rest of this piece continues below, but first, the news.

Disney Plans to Bring 500 Vertical Clips a Day to Disney+

An internal Disney presentation obtained by Business Insider reveals plans to ramp up to 500 new vertical clips daily by early April 2027, alongside creator content, microseries, and a potential free tier. Disney+ is looking increasingly less like a traditional streaming library and more like a platform designed for everyday engagement.

YouTube and Instagram May Be Microdrama Apps’ Biggest Competition

Storyboard18 explores why established social platforms may pose a greater threat to dedicated microdrama apps than competing services. YouTube’s new Shorts Series tools and Meta’s developing episodic features give creators new ways to distribute serialized content. With built-in audiences and discovery engines already in place, what exclusive value does a standalone app offer creators and viewers?

Meta’s Series Feature Gets a Christmas Microdrama

Pixie USA is launching Christmas at Maple Hollow Inn, a 20-episode holiday romance developed with food brand Bob Evans, on November 14. The series is also among the early projects associated with Meta’s upcoming Series feature, which organizes short videos into episodic collections. It’s another example of brands moving beyond traditional advertising and into original entertainment audiences might actively choose to watch.

True Crime Finds a New Home in Vertical

RoseBerry Media’s Epis is expanding its true-crime offering with Two Marys and The Swindler & the Billionaire Murder, two documentary series from Fremantle-backed Silvio Productions. The platform now has a true-crime lineup of 75 projects and more than 2,250 short-form episodes. As platforms experiment beyond scripted romance, true crime offers another genre built around suspense, revelation, and the irresistible urge to watch what happens next.

Tori Spelling and Brian Austin Green Reunite in a Vertical Thriller

Former Beverly Hills, 90210 stars Tori Spelling and Brian Austin Green have wrapped production on an untitled thriller microseries for vertTV, alongside fellow alum Carol Potter. The project marks another example of recognizable television talent entering the vertical space, bringing established fan bases and a little nostalgia into a format historically driven by lesser-known performers.

The BBC Takes a Closer Look at Britain’s Microdrama Boom

A new BBC feature examines the growing UK appetite for microdramas, speaking with audiences who have embraced the format’s fast pacing, familiar tropes, and low-commitment viewing experience. The UK is now Europe’s largest microdrama audience, according to Omdia. Interestingly, some fans are also growing tired of repetitive billionaire storylines, suggesting that the same familiar formulas driving the format’s success may eventually create demand for something new.

What Microdramas Understand That Quibi Didn’t

In a Forbes Business Development Council opinion piece, media executive Scott Schiller argues that the difference between Quibi’s failure and today’s microdrama boom isn’t the smartphone screen. It’s the business model. Microdramas have found ways to monetize cliffhangers and audience engagement, but retention and acquisition costs remain significant challenges. The larger question is who ultimately controls the audience relationship, and who captures its value.

The Media Industry Is Pivoting to Video. Again.

The Verge’s Mia Sato examines the industry’s latest pivot toward vertical video and the uncomfortable similarities to its failed video ambitions a decade ago. As publishers adapt their content for social feeds, platforms are already pushing creators toward longer-form programming. It’s a useful reminder that attention doesn’t automatically translate into revenue, and building a business entirely around platforms’ changing priorities remains a risky proposition.

Sometimes You Just Want a Snickers Bar

By Scott Brown

Continued…

The one part of the analogy I find myself pushing back on, and to be fair, I don’t even know if this was implied, is the idea that a Snickers bar is somehow a cheap or lesser thing.

Because if that’s the implication for digital storytelling, I reject it.

And I don’t think I reject it simply because I’m stubborn, or because I have a vested interest in all of this working. Though I’m self-aware enough to recognize that there may be a little of both at play.

I reject it because I genuinely believe in the evolution of this space.

That belief is bolstered by what I’ve watched unfold over nearly three years in vertical and other digital storytelling, after spending my entire career inhabiting the broader world of digital media.

And yes, there are people who want their Snickers bar.

What I like to call the standard-issue vertical. The werewolves. The billionaires. The soapiness. The familiar tropes and rhythms that audiences have come to know and love.

That’s the Snickers bar of it all.

But I’ll tell you something.

I’ve been to restaurants where incredibly talented pastry chefs have elevated things like a Snickers bar into something extraordinary.

And what made those desserts special wasn’t simply that they contained the same ingredients. Or “better” ingredients. It was that they came from chefs who understood exactly what made eating a Snickers bar so satisfying in the first place.

More importantly, they themselves authentically loved that experience.

They weren’t trying to replace it with something they considered more sophisticated. They were trying to delight people with something that was at once familiar and entirely new, tapping into a shared love they knew that they and their audience both shared. There was an “I see you and you see me” in all of it.

When I look at the recent vertical work of Issa Rae, or watch Pooja Tripathi, the creator of Brooklyn Coffee Shop, collaborating with Anthropologie on The Holiday Party, directed by Jonah Feingold, the mind behind Romantical, I see people who understand and love the Snickers bar, finding new ways to elevate it with people who love it too.

And I see audiences responding.

Audiences who love their Snickers bar, but who are equally capable of loving a new interpretation of it. Something that delivers the experience they came for while surprising them with something they didn’t know they wanted.

That’s exciting to me.

We’re approaching that time of year when emails start containing those words: “Let’s circle back in the new year.”

Things are beginning to slow down. Not all things. I doubt the people that read this are built for a total shutdown.

Still, this is a natural time for reflection. And I suspect I’ll be doing plenty more of it as the year winds down and we start gathering our energy for another sprint, or perhaps another marathon, toward the things we’re trying to build.

One idea I’ll be carrying with me into the new year is the importance of understanding and preserving the DNA of the storytelling experiences we’ve spent decades developing in digital media.

The rhythms. The joys. The things that make audiences feel at home.

But I’ll also be thinking very hard about how we elevate those experiences. How we surprise and delight audiences without losing sight of the things they loved in the first place. People question whether audiences want that, and I know they do. But they want it from people who know the feel of the thing.

Because I still love a Snickers bar.

But the way I love it has changed as I’ve gotten older.

And I believe audiences’ relationships with the stories we make evolve in much the same way.

The opportunity isn’t to convince people to stop loving their Snickers bars.

It’s to discover just how extraordinary a Snickers bar can become.

That’s it for this week’s Vertical Bloom.

We’ll be back next Thursday with more news, perspectives, and recommendations from the ever-evolving world of vertical storytelling.

See you in the scroll!

Editor: Scott Brown

Writer: Franziska Harms

Welcome to OG: Approved—where rule-breaking creators shape the future. Hand-picked by Open Gardens, they’re not following the playbook—they’re writing the next one.

Name: Pat Shea

Instagram: 174K Followers

Youtube: 16.5K Subscribers

Who is Pat Shea?

Pat Shea spent most of his life chasing a career in professional hockey before discovering that making people laugh about the sport might be more enjoyable than playing it.

Originally from Marshfield, Massachusetts, Shea played Division I hockey at the University of Maine before moving into the professional ranks. While still playing, he began documenting his experiences on YouTube, giving viewers a look inside college hockey, locker room culture, and the personalities that make the sport entertaining beyond what happens on the ice.

Those videos turned into comedy sketches, with Shea playing exaggerated versions of hockey players, coaches, parents, and just about anyone who’s spent too much time around a rink.

After stepping away from professional hockey, Shea began putting more energy into writing, acting, and filmmaking. He’s since moved well beyond individual sketches, developing a slate of episodic comedies featuring original characters and stories.

In May 2025, he released Full Ride, a five-episode comedy series following three freshman hockey players, Paddy, GSon, and Wheels, as they arrive at the fictional White Pine University. Drawing from his own college experience, the show follows the guys through the partying, friendships, and poor decisions that come with being young athletes suddenly living on their own.

Then there’s Jake and Zoey, a comedy featuring actress Hannah Kelly, and Small Town Cops, which pairs Shea with fellow creator FknBenji as officers Trent and Marty. .

What’s fun about Shea’s work is that he seems to have a growing collection of characters and ideas he wants to explore. He’s not just stretching one successful joke into a dozen videos. He’s trying different premises, working with other performers, and figuring out what can sustain an actual series.

And he’s doing much of it independently.

Three Things We Love About Pat Shea

He’s got a whole cast of characters living in his head: From clueless college hockey players to small-town cops who probably shouldn’t have badges, Shea has a knack for finding comedy in people who take themselves far more seriously than anyone else does. You get the sense he’s encountered some version of every one of them in real life.

He’s treating YouTube like his own television network: Full Ride, Jake and Zoey, and Small Town Cops are separate shows with their own characters and premises. Rather than developing everything around one recognizable persona, Shea is giving audiences different comedies to follow, all under his own creative umbrella.

He turned a hockey career into a comedy career: Most athletes leave their playing days behind when they move into entertainment. Shea has found a way to put those years to use, drawing on the people, experiences, and relationships he picked up along the way. It’s a pretty good second act for someone who once expected to spend his career on the ice..

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Welcome to The Vertical Bloom, a weekly dive into the fast-growing world of microseries and vertical storytelling. Here, we unpack the platforms, creators, and deals shaping the format that’s redefining what it means to make and watch scripted content in the mobile age.

This week, L’Oréal puts entertainment first in its latest ReelShort collaboration, Canada’s CBC opens the door to microdramas, and a Florida resort casts itself as the star of its own vertical series.

But first, Scott Brown on the language of our screens, the changing context of storytelling, and the worlds we carry in our pockets.

It’s Hip to Be Square. Maybe It’s Hip to Be Vertical, Too.

I really enjoyed Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim‘s documentary, You Can See Everything.

The moment I walked into the theater, I was struck not just by the shared laughter in the room or the quality of the storytelling on screen, but by the shape of the screen itself.

The choice to shoot in a 4:3 (basically square) aspect ratio, what it did for the feel of the piece, and most strikingly, its ability to express the close-up in a way that wasn’t necessarily new, but in the context of that theater, felt different.

Something Stacy Howard and our team talk about a lot is the language of exhibition. The ways in which the things we watch tell us what we’re watching, even before the story begins.

We walk into a theater. The lights go down. Everyone gets quiet. The trailers begin to play. It tells us we’re watching a movie.

We sit down on our couches, browse thumbnails on our television screens, and, at least until recently, look for something on Netflix. Now, more and more, it’s YouTube. But there’s still a language that tells us we’re watching TV, even if that word means so many different things now.

What’s interesting is that the phone goes with us everywhere. It travels with us. And when we pull it out of our pockets, there’s so much that it says.

When we stare at that vertical aspect ratio, it might deliver news of the mundane or the extraordinary. Heart-wrenching messages of love and departure. Silly cat memes and news of a life-changing election. Another Tuesday passes us by.

Every time I pull my phone out of my pocket, I don’t think I’m watching my phone. I don’t think I’m watching vertical.

Perhaps the point is that I don’t see it as an event. It’s been so ubiquitously woven into the fabric of my life. Wherever I go, it delivers to me the sum of human experience.

But innovations in hardware and the user experience of mobile platforms have started to give me pause more and more.

I’m beginning to think that this screen’s context is given by the life we’re living, whatever that may be in the moment we pull it out of our pocket.

I’m being entertained in bed. I’m being entertained in the bathroom. I’m being entertained on a car ride. I’m being entertained in line.

I’m being entertained while I’m being entertained.

But I think the really important thing is that the screen we carry with us everywhere isn’t an experience within which we contextualize storytelling.

Rather, if we do it right, and if we’re thoughtful enough not to do it too much, storytelling on that screen can enrich the moments between the moments of our lives.

There’s a song I really like, with a line that goes something like this:

“The world that’s in your pocket is not the world. The world is the one that lies before your feet.”

And that’s so true.

However, I’m thrilled to share the worlds our teams create from their imaginations, their hearts, and the living material of existence.

To fill the world with another world.

An ever-present world of storytelling, enriching the moments of this ever-changing life.

All right, let’s get into it.

L’Oréal Puts Entertainment First With ReelShort

L’Oréal is doubling down on branded microdramas, this time partnering directly with ReelShort for Urban Decay’s six-episode series Ghost Hunter Hotline. Launched October 24, the Halloween-themed romantic comedy generated 3.8 million views in its first five days, according to figures shared by the brand. The series was developed and produced in just four weeks, with L’Oréal leaning on ReelShort’s understanding of the format rather than relying on a traditional advertising agency.

The bigger story is a shift in philosophy. L’Oréal USA’s chief digital and marketing officer Han Wen says the company is prioritizing audience and entertainment over conventional product messaging. It’s another sign that branded entertainment is moving beyond product placement and toward genuinely platform-native storytelling.

Read the full story — Marketing Dive

Canada’s CBC Opens the Door to Microdramas

Canadian public broadcaster CBC has appointed Ariel Yang as its new head of digital originals, tasked with developing short-form scripted content for CBC Gem. While the initial focus is on series under 15 minutes, the network has confirmed that it is open to considering vertical microdramas if the right projects come along.

Yang brings relevant experience, having previously worked on Rent A Plus-One, a 57-episode Canadian microdrama for iQIYI International. As traditional broadcasters compete for audiences increasingly accustomed to mobile-first entertainment, vertical storytelling continues to find its way into conversations at legacy institutions.

Read the full story — The Hollywood Reporter

A Florida Resort Makes Itself the Star of a Microdrama

SkyBeach Resort in St. Petersburg, Florida, has taken an unconventional approach to destination marketing with A Weekend to Remember, an eight-episode vertical microdrama featuring local creators playing versions of themselves. Rather than finding locations to serve a script, creative director Cris Molina built the story around the resort itself, making the property the central character.

That decision created an interesting challenge for the filmmakers: balancing the intimate close-ups that vertical storytelling favors with the wider compositions needed to showcase the destination. The production ultimately found a middle ground, illustrating how brands are adapting the visual language of microdramas to serve different creative and commercial goals.

Read the full story — Net Influencer

That’s it for this week’s Vertical Bloom.

We’re excited to keep building this into a weekly home for the ideas, experiments, and creative voices shaping vertical storytelling in real time.

We’ll be back next Thursday with more headlines, more analysis, and another look at where this medium is headed.

See you then.

Editor: Scott Brown

Writer: Franziska Harms

FRESH CLIPPINGS

Instagram goes long

Hernan Lopez broke down Instagram’s new long-form format this week. The format is called Features, and it lets creators post horizontal video, reportedly up to 90 minutes, and it will also show up in Instagram’s TV app.

Lopez traces how Instagram got here. In March of last year he wrote about the rise of media super apps, with YouTube as the most complete example and Instagram and Spotify likely to expand next. Instagram stayed measured about TVs because Reels had just reached a $50B annual revenue run rate, up 5x in barely two years, after finally monetizing at the same rate per hour as the main feed.

So why go long now?

Adam Mosseri told Colin and Samir (interview below in Garden View section) that YouTube’s US mobile time spent looks flat and all of its growth is coming on TV, adding that it is about cultural relevance as much as time spent. Lopez’s chart shows Instagram going from half of YouTube’s mobile time spent in early 2023 to two thirds today, while YouTube’s time on TVs has overtaken mobile. As Mosseri put it, Instagram has to show up where people are. He also admitted he had been against long-form video on Instagram.

The pushback from the creator side has been about money. (Example 1, Example 2, and there’s a lot more where these came from). Because the thing is, Instagram does not plan to share advertising revenue from Features with creators, though it has left the door open to changing that later. Mosseri said that a revenue share would only be considered if it breaks even, while a Meta spokesperson said it is too early to share a long-term monetization model.

The lack of a platform-native revenue share could make talent hesitant to upload high-investment long-form content to the app.

That is why Lopez says podcasters and creators with baked-in sponsorships should be the most excited. It is also why creators whose income depends on YouTube’s revenue share have little reason to move their main uploads.

The worry sits with anyone who thinks premium streaming and the creator economy are separate ecosystems that don’t compete. YouTube is about to add premium TV, film, and sports in the US through its wholesale Peacock deal, and Instagram is now building a long-form home for the same living room audience.

Sony Pictures’ Creator Hiring Spree

Sony made two interesting hires over the past few weeks.

The first one is Fede Goldenberg taking over Screen Gems, the label behind Resident Evil, Underworld, and Easy A. Goldenberg spent 15 years at YouTube, most recently as head of film and TV partnerships, and is credited as a guiding hand in the rise of Curry Barker, Kane Parsons, and Markiplier. He also worked on Markiplier’s digital release of Iron Lung and on the Oscars deal. Under the new strategy, Screen Gems will keep making traditional genre films and will also develop theatrical projects from digital-native filmmakers.

This is the first time a studio division has reoriented itself toward this talent pool. Ashley Brucks, who has run the label since 2023, moves into a producing role.

Sony’s Sanford Panitch described Goldenberg as someone who has spent his career at the intersection of online creators and entertainment, which is exactly the relationship book a studio needs right now.

But is it an overcorrection?

The second hire is Lauren Glaubach, who joins Sony Pictures Television in a newly created role as EVP of distribution, digital and social platforms. She spent more than a decade at YouTube, most recently as global head of kids and family content partnerships, where she managed a portfolio of over 500 channels spanning traditional media and YouTube-first creators. She then moved to Pinterest to lead global content partnerships.

Her mandate is to expand Sony’s presence across YouTube and other digital platforms and to get more value out of its film and TV library.

Taken together, the two hires cover both directions of the convergence. Goldenberg brings creators into the theatrical pipeline. Glaubach takes the library out to the platforms where audiences already spend their time.

Will other studios follow?

Minimum Wage Breaks the Format

Netflix released the first 14 episodes of Minimum Wage on October 26, with a second batch of 14 to follow. The workplace comedy started as phone-shot shorts from American High. Those shorts drew more than 30 million views across YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram. The cast is the creator team, and most of them also wrote and directed the episodes.

The format is what stands out. Episodes run between 12 and 20 minutes, in a catalog where typical shows run 30 or 60. The Hollywood Reporter’s review opens with Quibi, whose executives were probably right that shorter episodes are a key part of storytelling’s future. Netflix has the eyeballs, and a creator-built show is the first real test of the instinct.

The review is mixed. It finds the show energetic and quick, and says it looks cheap on a big TV. That last point is the open question. A series built for phones now has to hold up in the living room, which is where more and more viewing happens.

If short episodes work here, expect more creator shows to arrive in the length they were born in, with no stretching to fit a 30 or 60 minute slot.

GARDEN VIEW

HARVEST QUOTE

"Consumers used to be programmed to know the difference: 12 o’clock on Monday vs. 9 p.m. on Thursday meant completely different things. We knew it because the distributors told us so and programmed/sold advertising accordingly."

— Bloomberg’s Lucas Shaw

This analogy is more prescient than ever as creators never worked inside a schedule. A 12 minute episode, a 90 minute podcast, and a Short all sit side by side, and the viewer decides what each one is worth. But now that Netflix is putting short comedies, publisher clips, and creator shows next to its prestige originals, it has to find a new way to tell viewers what each thing is.

Have a great weekend.

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Welcome to OG: Approved—where rule-breaking creators shape the future. Hand-picked by Open Gardens, they’re not following the playbook—they’re writing the next one.

Name: Varun Rana

Instagram: 102K Followers

Youtube: 14.1K Subscribers

Who is Varun Rana?

Varun Rana spent years working in tech before realizing that making fun of the industry might be more entertaining than working in it.

Originally from Michigan, Rana studied computer science at the University of Michigan before landing a job at Amazon and eventually working at several startups. Along the way, he became familiar with the strange rituals of corporate life, from performative productivity and endless meetings to startup founders convinced they’re changing humanity with another software platform.

In 2021, he began posting comedy sketches on TikTok, initially drawing from his experiences growing up Indian American before expanding into workplace humor. By 2024, after losing his job, Rana decided to pursue content creation full-time.

His comedy is typically deadpan, with characters who treat completely ridiculous situations as perfectly normal. Whether he’s portraying an overly enthusiastic recruiter or a self-important startup employee, there’s a familiarity to his performances that makes the jokes work and feel authentic.

His work has attracted partnerships with Zoom, Notion, Zapier, Rippling, and OpenAI, companies that recognize the value of reaching audiences through someone who understands their culture and knows how to make them laugh.

Outside his sketches, Rana has been experimenting with longer YouTube videos, comedy music, and writing. In a 2025 essay titled You Have Too Much Free Time, he reflected on growing up making videos, recording music, and pursuing creative projects that rarely reached anyone beyond his immediate circle. Those interests eventually took a back seat to a conventional career, only to become the foundation of his work years later.

There’s something interesting about how that early creative curiosity has resurfaced now that he has an audience. The skills he developed making things for fun have become commercially valuable, while the platforms he’s using give him the freedom to explore ideas that might not fit neatly into one format.

For someone who was once told he had too much free time, he’s found a pretty good way to spend it.

Three Things We Love About Varun Rana

His characters feel familiar: Rana has a knack for capturing the personalities and awkward interactions that define modern professional life. His deadpan delivery makes even the most ridiculous characters feel believable.

He makes brand partnerships entertaining: Working with companies like Zoom, Notion, and OpenAI, Rana incorporates sponsors into original comedy rather than relying on conventional advertisements. His approach keeps the entertainment at the center of the partnership.

He turned a career setback into an opportunity: After losing his job in tech, Rana committed to creating content full-time. Rather than starting from scratch, he built on years of creative experimentation and found a way to turn something he genuinely enjoyed into a career.

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Every year, I have the honor of running a panel at NALIP—the National Association for Latino Independent Producers—at their annual conference. In July of 2025, I interviewed Whalar co-founder Neil Waller, who shared his ambition to build MTV for the next generation. Earlier this year, he and his partner James Street took that idea into the world with the launch of Lyrical Lemonade TV. Neil thinks and builds at a macro level. Its fascinating and inspiring to see how he thinks.

But for the filmmakers trying to navigate the changing landscape, this year I wanted to bring the conversation closer to the work: How are producers and production companies bringing the traditional film business and the creator economy together? What does that look like in practice?

I started asking around about who was doing it. I was surprised and how few examples turned up. But eventually those conversations led me to Ben Stillman, co-founder of Further Adventures.

Ben is running the kind of experiment we keep coming back to at Open Gardens: taking the experience and capabilities of the traditional film business and building a company with creators, with their ambitions at the center.

Below is a brief overview of Further Adventures, followed by our conversation. I’ve edited the transcript for length and clarity, marked the cuts, and added my own commentary between exchanges.

The business in brief

Further Adventures is a content studio that sits between digital and traditional media. It soft launched in 2024 and is led by Stillman and Steve Beckman, a childhood friend of Stillman’s who spent about a decade at YouTube.

Stillman’s background is firmly legacy. He started at Cinetic selling international distribution rights, co-founded Black Bear Pictures with Teddy Schwarzman in 2011 and eventually ran its TV studio, then founded Birchall Entertainment in 2022. His credits include The Imitation Game, I Care A Lot, Gold and Ben Is Back.

Further Adventures does three things, and keeps a traditional slate alongside them:

• Invests in creator channels. Capital for channels with an audience that want to expand their output or their team.

• Develops original IP. Projects built with creators and storytellers, often starting from an existing audience or community.

• Helps creators go to Hollywood. Development, packaging and production support for creators who want to make features or series.

They have several projects in development across those buckets. One is Greener Grass Awaits, a feature based on a horror video game that found its audience on YouTube. A surreal horror story disguised as a late-night round of golf, the game built a cult following through gameplay videos that generated millions of views.

Further Adventures also maintains a traditional indie film slate, including Walter Thompson-Hernández’s If I Go Will They Miss Me (made on a microbudget—just crossed a million bucks in theater box), Ramzi Bashour’s Hot Water and Casey Modderno’s Here for the Weekend.

Two questions run through the conversation. What does a legacy company offer a creator who already has an audience? And what does it take in return?

The conversation

Ben Odell: Tell us your background and why you made this move.

Ben Stillman: I started in the traditional film business, working for a company called Cinetic in New York, which sells international rights, so I built an understanding of the business from more of an agent’s perspective. Then I went off to launch, in 2011, a company called Black Bear, which has grown in a lot of ways but at the time was really focused on production and film financing. We made movies like The Imitation Game and I Care A Lot. I really came to understand the business from not just a producer’s perspective but more of a studio perspective. Toward the end I was working in TV there, launching a TV studio, in an era when independent TV was still vibrant.

At some point I wanted to build my own thing. One of my childhood friends, Steve Beckman, was at YouTube for about a decade, and we’d always talked about ways we might work together. He was ready for a transition as well. There was a moment arriving of the convergence of what I have done for 15-plus years producing film and TV, and seeing some of the struggles of the marketplace, with the opportunities coming from what Steve’s expertise really was, which was the creator economy, digital storytelling and digital distribution. We decided to bring our expertise and relationships together to build a company that’s telling stories we’re proud of, supporting storytelling of all sorts with a bit more of a forward-thinking model.

What I like here is that Ben isn’t making some big declaration about creators being the future. He’s a producer with 15 years in the business who found the traditional marketplace too rigid and teamed up with someone who knew the digital side. That’s a different starting point from a legacy company adding a digital division. Both perspectives are there from the beginning. Of course, a lot depends on those two people and their judgment. I’m curious to see how they carry that into a bigger company.

Ben Odell: You could have kept making movies. Where did you see opportunity beyond that?

Ben Stillman: We’re intentionally diversified still. Two years into the company, we’ll do everything from investing in great channels, to creating original IP, to figuring out whether there are ways to expand on a creator’s audience and brand. For others, capital isn’t as much of a need. It’s really more, how can we bring our expertise, our relationships, our perspective to help them? If they have an interest in telling a story they’re going to bring to Hollywood, we can help navigate that, because so many people in this space have built their own businesses with just themselves or a couple of trusted partners. They’re not having to take on extra infrastructure, extra notes, extra perspectives, and that’s probably turned out really well for them.

A lot of our early conversations came down to: you have this audience, you’re a great storyteller, you can keep doing what you’re doing, but do you have aspirations to tell a 100-minute feature? […] There’s a before and after as far as how they’re thinking about it. Are they looking to do it in a roll-up-your-sleeves, bootstrap way, make the smallest version of it, versus partnering with A-list producers who come with all their talent relationships and the studio deal?

Creators have built businesses without a producer or studio weighing in on every decision. Why bring that in now? Ben seems to understand that he has to give them a good reason. And for a producer, it’s worth asking what the creator actually wants help with. Getting something made on a small budget and building it into a studio project are different jobs, with different deals.

Ben Odell: Take us through what investing in a channel looks like.

Ben Stillman: There are channels that have built up a meaningful audience and are now looking to raise another round to expand their output or bring in people. A lot of creators began as one person with a camera, and then they built a reliable audience that wants to see more of the story they’re telling, and that requires more time and support. Sometimes it’s hiring someone to oversee the brand deals and business relationships so they can focus on the creative, or someone who wants to have a writers’ room because they’ve been doing it for a number of years and now feel stretched too thin.

It’s not cookie-cutter. There are some that are almost a manufacturing problem, where they have more demand than they can support, so they need more capital for it. For others, it’s the trajectory of what they’re trying to do as storytellers, and the aspirations are changing. Within that we’re trying to figure out deals that make sense for both sides, because these are self-sustaining businesses, and if you’re taking on capital it has to make sense for them. For us, it’s the right balance of where we still have upside. We’re very focused on telling stories in the traditional space, but we want to support a digital channel too and find ways to bridge both, creatively but also from the business standpoint. That’s sometimes an interesting dance.

What interests me here is how practical the investment can be. A creator already has an audience but needs writers to make more shows or a business manager to keep up with the work. Further Adventures can put money toward that specific need or help organize their business better. Each creator needs something different, though, which means Ben and Steve have to spend time understanding the business before deciding if / where they can help.

Ben Odell: Do creators actually want what a traditional producer has to offer?

Ben Stillman: For sure. YouTube TV is so ubiquitous, and people are watching content on digital platforms so much that quality has to match that expectation for the audience. There is definitely a need to navigate the actual Hollywood system, with the gatekeeping, frankly, that people are not always used to. You need help to do something as simple as cast your project, and have those relationships. But there’s also an anxiety for a lot of people who are used to doing everything on their own terms to suddenly be on set with 50 to 150 people who are all trying to service their vision, and how to manage that. That’s not always an intuitive thing for someone who hasn’t done it before.

This is where an experienced producer can be really useful. Having a million followers doesn’t prepare you to run a 150-person set. A good producer knows how to do that. The trick is bringing that experience into the room without taking over or making the creator feel like they’ve lost control of their own project.

Ben Odell: What mindset shift does someone from legacy have to make to work with creators?

Ben Stillman: It’s been eye-opening and inspiring. I’ve been doing this for 15-plus years, and sometimes you get frustrated with how hard it is to make a movie that can be great. And then you approach something with the thought, oh, maybe we don’t need permission to do this. There are budgetary parameters, of course, but it’s really about leaning into that spirit.

On the business side, it’s interesting because traditional Hollywood is: you pay for it, you own it, right? That’s the way it works. Here are creators who have built their own audience, have their own IP that they’ve spent years developing in many cases, and that warrants a bit more collaboration. This shouldn’t be the thing where you’ve done a great job building something and now you have to hand the keys over. It should be a genuine partnership.

But what does a creator give up in exchange for that help? That’s where I think about the multi-channel networks, or MCNs, of the 2010s. Hollywood money came into YouTube, creators were called partners, and the companies often ended up owning the rights. Eventually, creators started asking what they were getting out of the arrangement.

I brought up Lyrical Lemonade TV because of how they structure that partnership. Music video director Cole Bennett curates the channel, bringing in creators to make shows for his audience. The partners fund the shows, but creators own a significant portion of their IP and shares in the ad sense, brand deals, etc. I wanted to hear how Ben thought about that trade and where he saw the business opportunity.

Ben Odell: If you’re sharing ownership with the creator, how does that change the business for you? Where do you see the opportunity beyond the film itself?

Ben Stillman: It speaks to the entrepreneurial approach that a lot of creators take. Think about traditional film: most movies, you’re lucky to be in net profits. If you’re investing, you’re getting 120 percent back, and that’s considered a win. But then it kind of ends there. So there may be more value to that individual film, but it’s not the most sustainable business. Creators have been more entrepreneurial: merch, brand deals, label concepts where they support other creators and build their own channels. For us it’s exciting to embrace shared ownership of the IP, which is okay. Maybe this film gets made and we’re not fully owning it as we might otherwise in a different system. But we’re also participating, helping support your larger business, which is really a mini corporation in terms of what they’re creating. That makes it a lot more exciting for what could actually make somebody.

I’ve always thought making a movie is a little like opening a restaurant, getting it packed, and then closing it two months later. If you’re lucky, you get to reopen a few years down the road with a sequel. We spend all that time and money finding an audience, then give them very little reason to stick around. Working with creators gives us a chance to rethink that. What else can we build together that keeps people coming back between films?

Ben Odell: Have you thought about movies as one piece of a bigger ecosystem around a community?

Ben Stillman: Definitely. We have one project we just shot in New York this past summer called Old Soul, with a creator [named Babish] whose YouTube channel is centered on cooking and recreating famous meals from movies. He always wanted to tell this specific story, and he has the good fortune of a very successful channel that kept him very busy. We met, we talked about this idea, and we said, let’s figure out how to make this actually happen. We made it this past summer, and I think it’s turning out great.

We’ll submit to the festivals. If it can be a Sundance or South by or Tribeca short, that’s still fun and meaningful. But we’ve also talked about whether there’s something else. His channel focuses on food. Is there a food-related concept and format that can accompany this short? Is this the type of thing we can take to 30 cities, doing a live show of what people know you for while also screening the film in a meaningful way? […] It’s not just making a movie and then putting it out there, hoping for the best, which frankly is a lot of what you do in traditional, right? It’s thinking about how you’re going to market something, how you’re going to build off it before it’s even a success, and how you get the audience to engage and invest as much as possible, so that they feel ownership of it, both for the success of the IP you’re building and for the other opportunities that come from it.

Babish’s audience comes for the food. The challenge is giving them a reason to follow him into a very different kind of storytelling.

Ben Odell: What do you look for in a creator who wants to move into a traditional format?

Ben Stillman: It’s a little bit subjective and intangible, but we’re always looking for a unique point of view. One of our original conversations, Steve and I, was that yes, it’s great to capture an audience on whatever digital channel, but not everyone’s going to film school anymore. Some people have been telling stories on TikTok or YouTube since they were eight years old and have honed those skills as storytellers. Being able to identify talent that has something to say and that wants to take the next step, whether it’s an extension of what they’ve already built or not, is what we look for.

I don’t think there’s one thing we’re looking for, but we’re looking for creators who aren’t following the trends, who aren’t following the algorithm. We’ll take projects with people who have only a couple thousand followers on YouTube because they seem like they have something to say and they’re putting stuff out consistently and it’s growing. It’s really the same thing we’re looking for on the traditional side, where you see a short and say, that’s someone I want to support the future of.

At Sundance, someone has already sorted through thousands of films before you sit down. YouTube doesn’t have that filter, and subscriber counts don’t tell you who can tell a story. Ben is bringing that same producer’s eye to YouTube, even to channels with a few thousand followers. That’s a bet on talent, and a harder one to sell to investors—which brings us to the next question.

Ben Odell: Do you have any rigorous way to value one creator’s community against another’s?

Ben Stillman: I would say it’s not. We maybe should be more rigorous with some of the process, but sometimes it’s gut. Depending on the creator, is this growing or not? If they’re selling merch, how does that merch sell? Have they done sub-channels from the main thing they’ve grown, and how are those numbers? There are many services we can pay for that give us very granular data, and that’s great. But it’s also just looking at it as all of us producers, but also consumers. You watch one thing and you’re like, I’m happy to watch this while I’m doing laundry and it entertains me, but I’m not going to pay 20 bucks and leave the house and spend two hours for my kids to go and see it, right? So what shows evidence-level commitment as an audience, that people who’ve been excited from the start will actually come along for?

There are also a lot of creators who’ve done incredible things and are starting to be on the downside of their influence, and are aware of it. Sometimes that’s an opportunity, because it’s how people creatively want to do something different. And there are other times where you look at it and people want valuations based on things that were happening three years ago and maybe not so much anymore.

Ben’s laundry test gets at a question I keep coming back to: will someone who watches a creator while folding clothes pay for a ticket and leave the house to see them? We’ve seen audiences make that leap with horror, but how much of that is about the creator, and how much is about the genre?

Ben Odell: Iron Lung, Obsession and Backrooms were three very different models. Do you expect this to translate beyond horror?

Ben Stillman: I agree they’re all distinct and worked in different ways. The timing of it, of course, yielded this mentality of the creator-to-traditional pipeline. When Steve was still on YouTube, we met with one of these filmmakers well before all this, when he was around 16. I think there are three very different scenarios, but there are things you can take from each.

It’s a great question. We thought a lot about this, because even before these three pictures there were a lot of horror shorts on YouTube that got the feature-film treatment, and some did well, some not. There’s an obvious intersection with a genre that people will still go to the theater enthusiastically to see, combined with an audience that was excited to support it because the creators made it. I do think it hasn’t been proven yet in other genres so much. But there’s a YouTube new wave, a lot of talented filmmakers who have taken the form of vlogging and done it with more narrative behind it, and it’s compelling. For us, a bet on talented filmmakers who happen to be putting stories on YouTube will yield an audience. And I want to celebrate the movies made for a few hundred thousand dollars, not only look for big box office records.

Horror makes this harder to read because it already brings an audience of its own. Comedy and drama will tell us more about how much of the draw is the creator—and whether the budgets make sense for the audience that follows.

Ben Odell: If I’m a producer with a couple of independent films and no capital, how do I make this shift?

Ben Stillman: It depends where you’re starting. If you’re looking to break into Hollywood and you’re trying to figure out whether to focus on finding that next great script or finding an interesting creator, I think there’s a lot of creators who don’t have great scripts who want to do a feature or a series. They have an audience and they’re doing one particular thing, but they don’t know how to transition. So if you have the scripts, and maybe the doors to getting a meaningful filmmaker or cast on board are closed or nearly closed, maybe there’s a creator interesting to you. You reach out, and you find a way to be the one proactively making that bridge. I think that’s something a lot of creators are looking for.

It depends on your own network. Traditionally, thinking about a project is the package: script, filmmaker, cast. Now it’s also, how do you have something that extends beyond that? Do you have a creator who’s involved? Someone in your life who has a clothing label or an interesting publication can amplify the potential audience of a project.

I think a lot of producers hear “creator economy” and feel like they have to start over. But finding a voice you believe in and bringing them the right material is work we already know how to do. We just have to get used to looking in different places.

Ben Odell: What excites you about the future of entertainment?

Ben Stillman: Beyond access to new voices and storytellers coming from digital spaces, the more people get inspired and excited about [Backrooms, Obsession, Iron Lung] and so on, the more that’s going to motivate people who maybe wouldn’t otherwise give it a try. I’m really excited that people are going to the theater again. This younger generation seems to really care about that. The economics of that are exciting, and it’s not as dire as it was a few years ago. […] Here’s an idea with a passionate audience online, and how do we tell that story so it will play in the theater, and people will show up because it’s a great movie, but also because they’re bringing to it this expectation, this understanding, this enthusiasm. That’s something I’m very optimistic about.

What I take from it

What interests me about Further Adventures is that Ben and Steve are building this while still making traditional indie films. That’s how I think this shift will happen for a lot of us. We bring what we know, find people who know what we don’t, and figure out where we can build a business together. Sometimes a creator needs money to hire writers. Sometimes they need someone who can cast and run a bigger production. And if we want to participate in the business they’ve spent years building, we have to be willing to share ownership of what we make together.

It’s still early. The company is two years old, we haven’t seen the deals, and Ben is candid about how much of choosing creators comes down to instinct. We also have more evidence that this works in horror than in other genres. I’m interested in seeing what these first projects teach them, especially where the audience follows and where it doesn’t. Those are lessons the rest of us could use.

Welcome to The Vertical Bloom, a weekly dive into the fast-growing world of microseries and vertical storytelling. Here, we unpack the platforms, creators, and deals shaping the format that’s redefining what it means to make and watch scripted content in the mobile age.

As promised last week, we’re taking you inside the inaugural ALZA Festival, which brought the vertical storytelling industry to New York City for three days of screenings, premieres, panels, and conversations about the future of the format.

Our guest contributors are Andrew Beck and Thom Woodley of Hudson Vertical, a New York-based studio working in the format. They were involved in the festival’s industry programming, and are well-versed in the sector, making them particularly well-placed to report on what happened both on screen and behind the scenes.

Their dispatch covers everything from the range of stories showcased at the festival to the conversations taking place around audience behavior, branded entertainment, production economics, and the opportunities emerging for filmmakers working in vertical.

We’ll get to their full report after our news round up.

But first...

No intro this week, I’m going to let Andrew and Thom take it from here, right after a quick look at this week’s headlines.

You’re in the best hands.

- Scott

Alright, let’s get into it!

Sony Pictures Television Signs First-Look Deal With Microdrama Creator

Sony Pictures Television has signed digital creator Thea von Engelbrechten to a first-look deal, including the animated microdrama Hazelwood. Another example of a major studio investing in digital-native storytellers, and a reminder that vertical’s potential extends well beyond live-action romance.

Hollywood Horror Veterans Launch a Creator-First Production Label

Image Nation Studios, Spooky Pictures, and Made By Us Studios have launched Made By Spooky, developing horror projects with digital creators across short-form, vertical, and traditional formats.

Astral Tequila’s Five-Episode Microdrama Reaches Six Million YouTube Views

Astral Tequila’s five-episode microdrama, inspired by Practical Magic 2, has reached six million YouTube views, according to the brand. Rather than adapting a traditional advertisement for vertical, the campaign uses serialized storytelling to give audiences a reason to keep watching.

Miami’s Vurt Wants to Give Independent Filmmakers a New Home

Miami-based Vurt is building a vertical entertainment platform for independent filmmakers, offering a 50/50 advertising revenue split. It’s an interesting attempt to create a sustainable distribution model for mobile-first storytelling outside the established studio system.

Reuters: Microdramas Are Poised to Challenge Hollywood’s Biggest Players

Reuters Breakingviews argues that microdramas’ low production costs and rapid audience growth could challenge Hollywood’s established players. It’s a forward-looking argument, but another indication that vertical storytelling is increasingly being taken seriously as a competitive entertainment business.

The Scroll Comes to 19th Street: Notes From the First ALZA Festival

By Andrew Beck and Thom Woodley

Disclosure: We run Hudson Vertical, a New York studio working in the format. We programmed “Made in New York: Building a Vertical Production Economy,” which Thom joined as a panelist. Thom also moderated “Beyond the Ad: Building Branded Vertical Series.”

ALZA Festival held its inaugural edition October 16th, 17th & 18th at AMC 19th Street in New York. Founded by Pete Torres, former COO of Tribeca Enterprises, the festival had the city’s Mayor’s Office of Media and Entertainment as its founding industry partner and Torres billed it as the first premium U.S. festival dedicated to microdrama and vertical storytelling.

The weekend paired screenings of vertical series - including 35 world premieres - with industry panels and creator conversations, giving audiences a chance to see the work and hear from the people behind it.

On The Screen

Billionaire romances shared the screen with vampire conspiracies, literary reinventions, political thrillers and distinctly New York comedy at ALZA. Across the slate, filmmakers were exploring how much territory vertical storytelling could cover and how familiar genres could take on a different rhythm in the format.

Established intellectual property offered one route in. Former Prodigy Media’s Moriarty Rising: A Sherlock Holmes Tale, directed by Alessio Liguori, relocated the beginnings of the Holmes–Moriarty rivalry to contemporary Turin, pairing a university setting with a diamond-heist mystery. LoveHit’s Pride and Prejudice, directed by Jerry Bradford, brought Austen’s marriage economics into a contemporary story involving unaffordable medical care. Alex Boi’s Billionaire’s Broken Vow, a romance-and-revenge story featuring Eric Roberts, joined these projects in opening a business conversation: producer Phil Viardo’s slate includes productions developed for release as both vertical series and independent features.

Genre filmmakers brought their own pedigrees and audience instincts. VertTV’s Bite Club, directed by Sam Irvin and written by Michael Varrati, combined campus romance, a murder investigation and a secret vampire society. Its casting supplied a knowing connection for horror fans: Barbara Crampton and Russell Todd reunited in the year of Chopping Mall’s 40th anniversary. Devon Jovi Johnson’s Married the Wrong Guy, with Richard Lawson among its producers, drew inspiration from ’90s action thrillers, placing a woman between her fugitive lover and the federal-agent husband pursuing him.

Reunion Island, from Microhouse Films and Lifetime, found another recognizable audience entry point in reality dating television. Directed by Gary and Edmund Entin, it turned a reunion of former contestants at a Maui mansion into a psychological trap. The creators explicitly cited the combination of Love Island’s interpersonal drama and Glass Onion’s murder-mystery appeal, illustrating how vertical producers are combining established audience appetites.

The independent work expanded the picture further where Kyle C. Mumford’s Kyle Has Tourette’s, part of the Created in NY Showcase, drew on real life for a heartfelt comedy about isolation and connection in the city. Best Vertical Series winner RelationShiTs brought estranged sisters, a possible murder and a psychedelic healing ceremony into one West Village brownstone. Innovation honoree Newborn, directed by Jan Latto and Hannah Rose Doherty, ventured into period crime drama, following young outsiders caring for a baby amid gang violence in the Bronx in 1979.

And the awards reflected that range: Gregory Alan Williams earned Best Performance for NOTED: Table For Two, while Salvador Paskowitz took Best Director for Layover. Sydni Beaudoin’s Voicemails From My Neighbor won Best Vertical Short, and the Entins’ election-conspiracy thriller The Count received the One More Episode Award. Romel Rodriguez’s The Super NYC earned the Made in NY Award, selected by the public. It was the first time the city’s honor recognized a vertical storyteller. Together, the selections suggested a format making room for both commercial hooks and individual creative voices.

Inside The Industry Program

The industry programming track consisted of 14 sessions covering everything from turning brands into studios to adapting stories for multiple screens to building an audience for African microdramas.

Evergreen questions kept surfacing in the panels we took in. What makes someone stop scrolling? What brings them back? And how does a series support itself once they do?

1. Getting Someone To Stop Is Only The Beginning

“I want to know where your finger is in the first three seconds,” Todd Spicer said at “Who Survives the Vertical Boom: Building the Business of Vertical Drama,” moderated by Amanda Needham. A filmmaker can expect someone who bought a movie ticket to give the story a little time while on a phone, the next thing to watch is always within reach. And Jay Blumenfield said learning to write for that audience required unlearning some habits from 20 years in television. His description of a microdrama was blunt: “a string of marketing moments stuck together that tell a loosely logical story.” Each turn has to give someone a reason to keep watching. Accept that requirement, he argued, and there is still room to bring your own ideas to the work.

Jeffrey Schenck traced the effect on structure, comparing a feature’s three acts with vertical stories built around dozens of breaks. But the producers were still testing assumptions about the format. Schenck recalled shortening episodes from 90 seconds to 50, “No one said anything.” While the pacing mattered, the prescribed running time was open to revision.

Spicer’s audience research had challenged another assumption. He had initially expected viewers to watch between shifts or while on the move. Instead, he described people watching in bed on Sunday nights for three hours, much as they would watch a favorite HBO show, indicating that a fickle audience that decides quickly on if a show is worth watching, can still settle in for an evening screening.

2. A Brand Can Build A Show People Come Back For

Bilt - the fintech loyalty rewards platform that lets renters and homeowners earn points on large monthly home payments - offered a detailed case-study of developing an audience from scratch for their series, Roomies. Cyrus Ferguson – the in-house content director at Bilt – described how an early batch of short, sketch-style episodes failed to catch on, leading the team to take them down and rebuild the series as a mockumentary, starting with one character’s arrival in New York.

In the pilot shown, protagonist Ellie arrives from Ohio with little money, no job and no apartment. Rent is an immediate problem for her to solve, giving the Bilt platform a natural place in her world. Bilt’s partner businesses also appear, including the café where another character works.

Roomies has more than 46 episodes out, averaging about 700,000 views apiece, without paid promotion. Overall, the stated goal is views and cultural reach rather than immediate conversion, allowing the show to build its own following.

3. The Series Can Live Where The Audience Already Watches

For several of the branded projects discussed, social platforms, not standalone apps, were the destination for a series. At “Beyond the Ad: Building Branded Vertical Series,” SuperLab’s Grace Swanson described distributing through brands’ social channels, reaching viewers where they already follow the company or its creators. The process she described involved developing 12-episode series with brands and choosing creators whose audiences fit each project. SuperLab also makes episodes shoppable: products are tagged within the videos, allowing a viewer watching a Crocs episode to buy the shoes on screen, while also supporting a non-paywalled show. And filmmaker Owen Gambill who produces The Weekly Bird for birddogs brand explained how the show draws its characters and setups from the very employees in the birdogs office.

4. Make Work That Could Only Come From New York

The question at “Made in New York: Building a Vertical Production Economy” was how to turn the city into a viable production hub for vertical storytelling. Woodley argued that New York couldn’t compete with LA or Atlanta on price. “We can’t win that and we shouldn’t try,” he said, proposing instead to make work that feels “indelibly New York.”

Panelists Qianfan Chen and Mitch Camarda also pointed to the city’s appeal on screen, the variety and density of locations, and the substantial pool of local talent and crew. In sum, write with New York in mind from the start. Build around its neighborhoods, available locations and local performers. Brooklyn Coffee Shop and Jonah Feingold’s romance-centric productions were cited as examples of series built around life in the city.

Panelists also discussed how New York City’s Mayor’s Office of Media and Entertainment (MOME) could better support the scale and pace of vertical production. Access to incentives remains another consideration: smaller productions can fall below the standard state film tax credit’s $1 million budget threshold for qualified films shooting primarily in the city.

5. Local Stories Can Find Audiences Elsewhere

At “Small Screens, Big Reach: Africa Goes Vertical,” CEEIT co-founder Lavenna Peters described finding little representation of Black stories when she began exploring microdrama apps. She saw an opportunity to build a platform around African creators and a massive young audience already watching entertainment on phones - (1.5B people with 60% of the population under the age of 25 according to UN Economic Commission for Africa).

Peters said the Asian microdramas she watched reminded her of Nollywood films she had grown up with and so CEEIT began acquiring the scripts to these successful shows to remake with African casts, alongside developing original work.

Producer Melissa Adeyemo argued that those stories should be made for Africans first. “I think things only travel if they speak locally,” she said. Drawing on Nollywood’s reach beyond Nigeria, she emphasized working with storytellers who know the lives they are depicting and recounted an experience when just because a producer has a connection to the diaspora doesn’t automatically mean that their version of life in Nigeria will ring true to Nigerians.

Peters made a similar point about language. Listeners around the world enjoy Burna Boy without understanding every Yoruba lyric and so why then assume a series needs to lose its local language to find viewers elsewhere? The session included a screening of the South African series Confessions of a Gold Digger.

Wrap Up

ALZA Festival’s first edition gave these conversations a useful home where producers could share their work, explain how it came together and compare notes. There was plenty of enthusiasm for where vertical storytelling could go, backed by examples of people already trying to get it there. That gives a second edition something to build on. Looking forward to year two.

Explore the full film program and industry sessions.

That’s it for this week’s Vertical Bloom.

We’re excited to keep building this into a weekly home for the ideas, experiments, and creative voices shaping vertical storytelling in real time.

We’ll be back next Thursday with more headlines, more analysis, and another look at where this medium is headed.

See you then.

Editor: Scott Brown

Writer: Franziska Harms

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Welcome to OG: Approved—where rule-breaking creators shape the future. Hand-picked by Open Gardens, they’re not following the playbook—they’re writing the next one.

Name: Deformed Lunchbox

Instagram: 295K Followers

Youtube: 73.9K Subscribers

Who is Deformed Lunchbox?

Apologies readers for my tardiness! I have been handling some things outside of Open Gardens. Back and ready to get into it with this week’s creator.

In 2016, Peter Hatch made a post on an online horror forum asking people to check out a new YouTube channel called Deformed Lunchbox. He was looking for feedback, potential collaborators, and anyone interested in watching some strange horror movies.

A decade later, Deformed Lunchbox has become an independent filmmaking collective with an extensive catalog of horror shorts, dark comedies, and genre experiments. Led by Canadian brothers Peter and Denman Hatch, the group has spent years producing original narrative films for YouTube, many built around premises that are as ridiculous as they are disturbing.

Make Me a Sandwich, a three-minute horror short about a husband who repeatedly demands that his wife make him sandwiches. What starts as an absurd domestic argument gradually becomes something much darker. The 2020 film has accumulated tens of millions of views and even received a sequel in 2025.

What makes Deformed Lunchbox particularly interesting is that they’ve built an audience around the films rather than themselves. Unlike personality-driven creators, the Hatch brothers largely stay behind the camera, allowing their stories and recognizable brand of horror to carry the channel. Each new release adds to a growing library of work that audiences can discover long after its initial upload.

YouTube provides distribution, while Patreon, memberships, and behind-the-scenes content give fans additional ways to support and engage with the filmmakers. It also allows the group to keep producing new work, testing ideas, and building relationships with actors and crew members without every project needing to become a feature or land a distribution deal.

The collective has since expanded into feature filmmaking with Baleful, a psychological horror film directed by Denman and produced by Peter. It’s a natural progression for a team that has spent years writing, shooting, editing, and releasing its own productions.

Three Things We Love About Deformed Lunchbox

They know how to make the ordinary terrifying: From Make Me a Sandwich to Toothbrush, Deformed Lunchbox turns everyday situations into disturbing horror films. Their ability to take simple premises and make them increasingly uncomfortable is what makes their work so entertaining.

They don’t take themselves too seriously: There’s a playfulness to their filmmaking that can sometimes get lost in independent horror. Whether embracing absurd premises or mixing pop-culture characters with horror villains, they’re willing to experiment and have fun with the genre.

They’ve made YouTube their own film studio: Rather than waiting for traditional Hollywood opportunities, the Hatch brothers have built a catalog of original films, developed a network of collaborators, and expanded into features. They’re showing how creator platforms can support filmmaking ambitions beyond individual uploads.

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Last week, a friend was speaking at SoCom, a new national event series about how people discover and buy products through social media. It brings together brands, creators, platforms, agencies and technology companies focused on creator-led sales and livestream shopping. My friend is a social media strategist and entrepreneur with an uncanny ability to see around corners. She knows I’m fascinated by what she does—and that I draw inspiration from it for my own businesses.

At lunch, we sat with two engineers who built a platform that scores creators’ value for brands, and a 22-year-old founder whose platform helps social media management companies analyze their creators and match them with brands. And then there was me, a legacy producer of television and film, trying to understand how all these worlds are colliding.

My friend said our lunch (perhaps a bit too generously) reminded her of the coffeehouses that helped launch the Enlightenment: people from different worlds exchanging ideas that would never emerge inside a single industry. She had explained, more clearly than I could, why I find it so valuable to get outside our core businesses and look around with curiosity.

On day one, I heard from SoCom organizer David Vanderveen; Vincent Launay of TikTok Shop; Leonard Armato of Management Plus Enterprises in conversation with John Kraski of Dhar Mann Studios; Jamie Gutfreund of Creator Vision; Deren Baker of Flywheel Ventures; K-beauty marketer Norman Chu with Rashmi Paul of SoCom News; and Will August of Outlandish. Their sessions covered celebrity brands, livestream commerce, creator measurement, affiliate sales and the increasingly blurry line between content and shopping.

Why does any of this matter to my business? Social commerce is rooted in storytelling and faces many of the same marketing problems as film and television. It offers a window into how people’s habits are changing and, for producers who know how to tell and market stories, a possible new source of revenue. That’s something we are pursuing at my company, candidly.

I could attend only the first day. Here are three things I learned.

Three things I learned about celebrity at SoCom…

As my brain tried to filter all this information, one theme emerged across a few different panels—the value of celebrity…

1. Brands are being told to stop chasing stars and start running a show. TikTok’s Vincent Launay told brands that success is no longer about one viral moment or one famous creator. It’s about “operational excellence.” One poignant example --- At K2O, the hydration brand Kylie Jenner founded, more than half the sales come out of a studio an operator built in his basement, where staff paid $50 an hour go live on TikTok. The celebrity’s name is on the brand, but the hosts are doing the selling.

Will August, whose agency runs TikTok Shop for brands, was blunter about trust. David Beckham, he said, “can’t convert because he doesn’t give social proof.” A famous face brings attention. The trust that closes a sale comes from the people showing the product and answering questions.

1. A famous face can’t fix a product that doesn’t deserve a second buy. David Vanderveen built the Excess energy drink, sold it to Amway in 2015, and later helped launch IM8, a supplement brand co-founded with David Beckham. IM8 reached about $200 million in revenue in roughly 18 months. Then he told a room full of founders not to copy it: “Be careful about celebrity brands. That’s coming from a very successful celebrity brand.”

Here is what Beckham actually did for IM8. He gave the brand “stratospheric awareness” and attracted major ambassadors and creators, but “it didn’t convert that many sales.” The celebrity is a megaphone, not an engine. It buys attention and recruits talent.

So why do so many celebrity brands fail quickly? Vanderveen’s answer was pretty blunt: the celebrity’s team isn’t involved day to day, and “the product doesn’t deserve a second buy.” Fame can win the first purchase. The second belongs to the product and the people running it.

1. Celebrity prices itself on attention, not on sales. Jamie Gutfreund made this point with a made-up example she borrowed from the founders of Trudy, a company that scores how much a creator is likely to sell for a brand. Marge makes one post and drives 100 sales. Lois makes many posts and drives the same 100 sales, but costs far more. A brand that counts only sales sees two equal results. Gutfreund called that “just dumb” but “preventable.”

The example is about creators, but it points to a bigger problem with celebrity. A famous person’s fee is set by an unscientific analysis of how many people know them—followers, box-office success and the like—not by how much they will sell. And brands often can’t check because they don’t track what each result cost them. Gutfreund said most companies don’t keep their own creator data. It sits in reports their agencies hand over.

So a big name gets paid like an engine when, as Vanderveen showed, it often works like a megaphone. Fame is worth paying for when you want attention or want to recruit other talent. It’s a poor bet when you’re buying sales. 3Pas is partnering with more and more creators, so this is now the first question I ask: what did each result cost? In plain terms, what did we pay, and what did we get?

The pattern: Fame buys attention. Everything after that is operations, product and measurement.

Where my head goes—The lesson on the commerce side feels fairly clear. As we’ve explored businesses with celebrities, I’ve watched some representatives become so focused on the percentage their famous client receives that they lose sight of what actually makes a company work: a product people want to buy again, strong distribution and disciplined operations. They overvalue the trust the celebrity has built with an audience and undervalue almost everything required to turn that trust into a durable business. The wreckage of celebrity brands is increasingly hard to ignore.

I’m less certain how neatly this maps onto entertainment. A star in a movie isn’t simply endorsing a product; the star is part of the product. But I do wonder whether legacy media companies make a similar mistake when they treat recognition as proof of demand. A famous name can attract attention, help secure financing and get a project through the door. None of that guarantees that people will watch—or tell someone else to watch. This story is as old as time—(Digger the latest example. Right star wrong movie, too expensive, etc)

However that question feels especially relevant as streamers struggle to market individual titles and make their spending produce durable value. Are companies paying stars for the audience they are assumed to bring without knowing whether that audience actually follows? Are they using casting to compensate for weaker development or marketing? And are they measuring the value of a star with the same vague proxies—familiarity, followers, past box office—that brands use when pricing celebrity endorsements? Maybe this is all pretty obvious. But I do think there is something new in this lesson around celebrity brands that we need to think about… I just don’t know what it is yet.

The quote that surprised me

“A lot of people talk about social commerce. We talk more about discovery commerce right now.”

That was Launay again. TikTok sees itself as erasing the old split between media that creates awareness and e-commerce sites that convert it. People arrive to be entertained, and the platform carries them “from awareness to conversion and even to advocating.” The scale behind it: more than 200 million active U.S. users averaging over 100 minutes a day, with time on the app up every year for five years. Those are TikTok’s own numbers.

What surprised me was the assumption underneath. Discovery commerce needs a viewer who is scrolling and open to being found. Lia Haberman, who tracks social media trends, wrote last November, “We’re in our slow social era.” People aren’t logging off, she said, but they are showing up more deliberately. Launay himself conceded that “intentional discovery,” where people search for products instead of stumbling on them, is “becoming even bigger.” If audiences become more deliberate, discovery by accident gets harder. And if brands get hooked on marketing to consumers online while consumers curb their social media habits, everyone has to pivot again.

Where my head goes—As consumer behavior keeps splintering, how do you chase the trends? They seem to be moving in different directions at once. Even within generational cohorts, the data is starting to contradict itself. It’s also an admission that, as a producer who lived by “if you build it, they will come,” paying attention to this data in a profound way is relatively new to me. I need to get smarter about it.

The moment I felt vindicated

As I’ve put more emphasis on creator businesses, I’ve found it hard to measure their value. How big is a creator’s community? What is a post worth? What is a channel worth to a brand? Every answer seems to come from a different tool measuring something different.

It turns out Jamie Gutfreund has been working on this exact problem, especially for brands. She put up a slide mapping the software companies brands use for creator marketing: audience intelligence, analytics, payments and more. One category has grown from about 15 companies to so many she’s “stopped counting.” There are enough tools to make your head spin like The Exorcist.

Then she said, “Who the hell knows what a view is anymore?”

If the person advising brands on this can say that out loud, I’m not behind. The industry is.

And where does my head go generally? We should all look for inspiration outside our own industries. MIPCOM and Sundance are necessary. But if those are the only rooms we enter, we’re just talking to ourselves. The muse needs many sources from which to draw…

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Welcome to The Vertical Bloom, a weekly dive into the fast-growing world of microseries and vertical storytelling. Here, we unpack the platforms, creators, and deals shaping the format that’s redefining what it means to make and watch scripted content in the mobile age.

This week, we’re doing something a little different. Scott spent the week at MIPCOM in Cannes, where the worlds of traditional entertainment and digital storytelling are increasingly converging. We’re bringing you the latest industry news, followed by Scott’s stream of consciousness, firsthand account of his experience, one day at a time.

And the excitement doesn’t stop in Cannes! The inaugural ALZA Festival kicks off in New York City October 16–18, bringing the vertical storytelling community together for three days of premieres, screenings, and conversations. We’ll have more on that below, plus exclusive insights from the festival in next week’s edition.

But first, Postcards from MIPCOM.

Day 0: The Day Before MIPCOM

I get into Paris on Sunday and take another plane to Nice. It’s nice. I realize that I shouldn’t have taken a cab because it costs twice as much as an Uber, but it’s fine because the driver is young and friendly and assures me that AI will not destroy the world, and coming from a Frenchman driving a used Renault, that feels real enough. I get into Cannes and my apartment isn’t ready, so I buy bread and mustard and charcuterie that costs 18 dollars back home but here it’s 2 euros, and I finally start Pluribus and go to sleep.

Scott’s experiences and learnings at MIPCOM continue below, but first, the news.

ALZA Festival Is Bringing Vertical Storytelling to the Big Screen

It’s a big week for vertical storytelling! The inaugural ALZA Festival takes over New York City October 16–18, bringing together creators, studios, platforms, and industry leaders for three days of premieres, screenings, panels, and conversations about the future of the format.

Get your tickets here!

And stay tuned! In next week’s Vertical Bloom, we’ll be sharing exclusive insights and takeaways from the festival, including what the conversations happening in New York mean for the future of microdramas.

TikTok and Made By Us Studios Announce Creator-Led Microseries Partnership

At MIPCOM, TikTok announced a new partnership with Made By Us Studios to co-produce premium, creator-led microseries for TikTok and PineDrama. The first two projects are Player, a romantic revenge thriller starring Hannah Stocking, and The Knock, a genre series starring Adam Rose and Zaria Simone. It’s another exciting step for vertical storytelling as major platforms move beyond distributing scripted content and into developing original series with creators at the center.

Fox and Hartbeat Are Turning Microdramas Into a Pipeline for Film and Television

Fox Entertainment and Kevin Hart’s Hartbeat have announced a partnership that will see an initial slate of 25 live-action microseries launch on Holywater’s My Drama platform. Fox will also have a first look at adapting successful titles into traditional film and television projects. It’s an interesting reversal of the usual model. Instead of shrinking traditional entertainment into vertical stories, the companies are using verticals to test new ideas, find audiences, and potentially build something bigger.

New Omdia Research Challenges Assumptions About Who Watches Microdramas

New research from Omdia suggests that the audience for microdramas may be broader than the industry has traditionally assumed. Men account for 54% of microdrama users in the UK and 50% in the US, according to the firm’s April 2026 research. The numbers vary considerably across markets, but the takeaway is exciting: while female audiences have been instrumental in building this industry, there’s enormous potential to reach new viewers through different genres and stories. Vertical is a format, not a genre, and the audience is continuing to prove it.

Postcards from MIPCOM Cannes 2026

Scott spent the week in Cannes for MIPCOM. Here’s what he experienced and learned.

Day 1

Somehow I sleep well and wake up at 8 a.m., which is great because I need to head to the MIPCOM opening CXO summit. David Freeman has helped the brass at MIP gather minds to address the problems of our industry, and actually, we do a halfway decent job of it. My table is talking about verticals. I learn about all kinds of interesting perspectives and ways that vertical is evolving. Shows like Parker’s Pocket creating daily plot points with the audience and companies like RoseBerry repurposing the stories of yesterday for the audiences of today. Aspect ratios are barely a part of it, but then again they are. David reminds me we’ve been watching vertical for a long time, and he’s right. I pitch my steadfast belief that it’s a new medium, and I’m greeted with nothing but optimism and excitement, and that really stuck with me. Watching the CEO of a major YouTube channel and the president of a major media company share a stage in front of all of us stays with me.

I go to the Palais. I like that that’s a sentence I get to type. In many ways, this is better than Cannes Lions imo. The walls are covered in stories and actors. It’s vibrant and alive and thinking about the audience, but I’m also surprised at how many international vendors are bragging about their YouTube presence.

Lots of meetings. People with ideas. The verticurious™️ and people with libraries and stories and digital NY people and digital LA people and digital people of the world, and I care deeply for them. The LA people laugh about how we flew 6,000 miles to have a lunch we could have done on Melrose, but here we are.

Drew Baldwin throws a dinner and I meet new and old friends, and the digital kids aren’t kids anymore, but youth has given way to something more interesting anyway. There’s so much excitement. There’s confidence doing the lambada with uncertainty. I eat the rarest steak of my life, but here it works. I talk politics with an Australian from Queensland. We both agree rodeos can be great.

I walk home. There’s so much projection mapping on the Croisette. A metaphor for technology building upon the past. I watch more Pluribus. I hit the fast-forward-ten-seconds button from time to time. I get it, Vince. But you’re still a genius. I sleep.

Day 2

I don’t sleep well, but it’s fine. I drink a little too much coffee and it’s mostly meetings. Announcements are made in the trades, and I spend time in the Palais heading to booths, talking and learning about all the genius packaging that goes on past the first window. There’s a clear digital presence, and it permeates the old guard, but it’s positive. Change feels good. Necessary.

I got a cold email from an investment bank celebrating an anniversary on a yacht. They want to meet me. I take off my shoes and I walk a red carpet plank, and they give me a flat white, and I talk to a man who helped finance Lord of the Rings. He’s wearing Ray-Bans, and I think it’s a very impressive accomplishment by the Ray-Ban corporation that even among men at this level of success, they’ve got market share.

The British man in the Ray-Bans is generous with experience and smart and listens and genuinely cares about emerging mediums, and I tell him about my journey and the vertical world, and he already knows a lot. It’s a good sign, I think. He agrees the business model hasn’t worked itself out. But he believes it will. We agree there. He implores me to keep focusing on quality. I assure him I will. It’s good to be told something I believe so much by a smart man on a yacht who helped bring Gandalf to the world.

The sun sets, impressive, and I go to a party in a room that is very red, and Evan Shapiro gets on the decks for the first time and DJs. He looks the part, but more importantly, he is the part tonight. I see David again. He deserves mention as a driving social force of this event. I see old and new friends again. We talk business and we talk life as Ra Ra Rasputin plays. The positive energy has a depth to it. Here on the Croisette in the red room, things feel real.

I don’t drink these days, and it’s a big day tomorrow, so I leave and I go to my temporary home and I watch more Pluribus and I sleep eventually.

Day 3

I start the day at a vertical summit, and they have some really interesting facts to share from Omdia. 1 in 12 video users have downloaded a microseries app. YouTube Shorts is a more popular app than Netflix in the US. There’s a growing interest across the vertical video scripted space in all age ranges and genders. There’s nothing micro about any of this. I lead the table. The British woman next to me used to work at the BBC, and she and the Turkish man (also next to me) have so much in common. For them, in Europe, it feels more new. It’s an energy that reminds me of 6 months ago back home. It reminds me that things are evolving towards confidence and the duty and the weight that comes with certainty of something worth pursuing.

Right after the panel, I drink too much coffee again, and then I’m in the grand auditorium. I watch Anatolii Kasianov from Holywater with Tanya Cohen from Made By Us and Sammie Hao from ReelShort and moderator Scott Roxborough from The Hollywood Reporter share the same stage that Francis Ford Coppola received the Palme d’Or on. Hallowed ground. The room isn’t packed, but it’s whatever two degrees before packed is. There’s a lot of people. ReelShort plays a trailer. No applause. There’s still a creative tension. But it’s still a packed room. The hard work of passionate people will break that tension. It’s an inspiring moment.

I have coffee with Anatolii. I ask him about the future. There’s a lot of change coming. Good change if it works out. More on that another day.

Miles of meetings. The final sprint. More minds this space needs. Production isn’t going away, but it’s going to change. But then again, the language of story always does. I’m stubborn and I’m ready to change all at once, and I know I’m not the only one. I’m tired and wired, and then it’s time for my panel. Dawn Yang and Sandra Ouaiss and Tanya again and me, and they announce their partnership. I talk about our projects with Eli Roth and Alfred Street. More on those soon too. We all have news. Excitement. I like to think the world of digital scripted storytelling got a few more converts that hour on the Atlantic coast. I share my faith that all roads will lead to YouTube and TikTok and Meta. Where risk is often rewarded and formats are truly realized before they are torn down and reborn anew.

I have one more meeting with an Irishman who majored in North Indian sitar and teaches me about ragas. He’s pivoted since. We also have a reason to talk business, but the raga is what sticks with me. A meditation on theme that explodes into beautiful energy. And it’s passed down through generations, and you can track your teachers back 2,000 years to when the goddess Saraswati gave music to humanity. I once learned screenwriting from the man who wrote Top Gun. Storytelling really is an oral tradition.

I have one more dinner. A final meetup of legacy and digital. People barely talk business. Our batteries are drained, but only so they can be charged again. Some have early flights. There’s a real sense of camaraderie. We were all just part of a small yet important step on the infinite journey towards the future.

I go home. I finish Pluribus. I want season 2. I want a faster season 2. Vince should watch a vertical. Vince should never change. I go to sleep.

Day 4

I wake up. I go to Nice. It’s still nice. I fly to Rome. I get in a cab. I call a friend and a colleague because in this industry those lines bleed.

“I hope you take this the right way. It sounds like you’ve got the post-conference glow.”

I take it the right way. Nobody has ever told me that. It really feels like something happened this week. But not just to me. Around me. I hope it happened for a lot of people.

The winds of change follow me to Rome, and my friendly cab driver is yelling with their hands at some other driver in Italian, and pinched fingers fly around this Fiat, and there’s an electric tomorrow ahead, but tonight I sleep and I dream of home and the things that really make it a home and a life and how I can put it all into the next story we tell with the people we tell them with, and tell them for, and the people who help us share those stories with the world that is so very, very worth it.

I crave meaning. I crave pizza.

En Avant.

That’s it for this week’s Vertical Bloom.

We’re excited to keep building this into a weekly home for the ideas, experiments, and creative voices shaping vertical storytelling in real time.

We’ll be back next Thursday with more headlines, more analysis, and another look at where this medium is headed.

See you then.

Editor: Scott Brown

Writer: Franziska Harms

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A year ago, as Paramount and Skydance prepared to merge, I wrote about the idea that studios need to also go deeper rather than just wider.

The opportunity—and increasingly, the necessity—is to build around specific communities and fandoms. Disney showed what that can look like with Marvel and Star Wars: flywheels spanning film, television, live experiences, merchandise, and community.

Paramount already had the raw material. Star Trek, Mission: Impossible, and Yellowstone aren’t simply titles in a library—they’re worlds with passionate audiences. What would it look like to build around those fandoms more intentionally, creating entire verticals rather than just commissioning the next sequel or spinoff?

Some facts have changed since then but the thesis still stands so re-releasing —

Whenever I see A24 on a show or a film, I pay attention. They’re the kids at the cool table — and the closest most of us get to sitting there is watching what they make.

But when I saw the trailer for The Smashing Machine, it felt like a rehash — The Wrestler, The Iron Claw — a movie from another time. For the first time, an A24 release felt like a product of scale, not spark.

On The Town last week, Matt Belloni and Lucas Shaw nailed the financial side: A24’s $300M raise at a $3.5B valuation means they now have to scale like a midsized studio — risking the dilution of the very brand that built that value. But they missed one question: do they go vertical or horizontal?

The question I’ve been asking about A24 since their raise—

Do they deepen the core — turning fans into community and community into business — or do they chase the studio model, scaling budgets, output, and reach?

Because that’s the fork every entertainment company is standing at whether they know it or not. I’ve been asking the same question about New Paramount…

A24 built a handmade brand in a mass-produced world. Paramount built the factory that defined mass production itself. But both are facing the same question on very different scales: where is the growth?

Why Vertical Matters Now

Thank God for Doug Shapiro.

As I was wrestling this week with how to frame this stack and whether I had the authority to write it (truly nobody asked me), he dropped one of his weekly doses of wisdom and just what I needed— Fan Surplus, HYBE, and the Science of Fandom with the perfect subhead: “Why the future of media is selling more to fewer.”

Here are the headlines:

• Attention is tapped out. You can’t grow on minutes watched anymore. We are all at media (over) saturation.

• Creation costs are collapsing. As GenAI floods the market, content becomes abundant and cheap. The profits move to complements — products and services that live around the content.

• The future is fan surplus. Superfans want to engage more deeply, more often, across more dimensions. The opportunity is to capture that energy — to sell meaning, not minutes.

Breadth has hit its limit; depth is unbounded. The companies that win will be the ones that monetize depth.

This is where my head keeps going…

A24’s Vertical Play: (And why this is about all of us)

A24 didn’t earn that valuation by chasing volume — it built a business out of taste.

For its fans, watching isn’t enough; you have to be tapped in. The studio leaned into that subculture, turning aesthetic integrity into belonging: high-concept merch,, and a logo that became shorthand for taste.

The challenge now is scale. The only sustainable path is vertical — deepening its core rather than widening its footprint. That means turning its aesthetic into a flywheel:

1. Lifestyle as Extension:
   Not just “movie merch,” but MoMA Design Store — high-margin, artful products that express the A24 worldview between releases. Fashion brands.

2. Live and Experiential:
   Film is the entry point, but gathering is the glue. Pop-ups, salons, screenings, curated events that reinforce identity and monetize belonging.

3. Creator and IP Incubation:
   Sign the filmmakers, writers, and weirdos who fit the brand. Build a feedback loop between art, commerce, and new IP.

4. Music as Emotional Core:
   Music has always been the pulse. A small label or curated live events could anchor the emotional side of the business and drive loyalty.

When these layers reinforce one another, A24 becomes more than a studio — it becomes a self-sustaining ecosystem. Loops, not launches.

Which leads me to Paramount…

Paramount x Oracle: Can You Build Vertically with a Tech Spine?

We all know this part.

In 2025, Skydance and Paramount closed their merger and began trading as Paramount, a Skydance Corporation. The company reorganized into Studios, Direct-to-Consumer, and TV Media, with a public mandate to modernize and deliver “real efficiencies.”

David Ellison has been clear from day one: this isn’t a content factory — it’s a media-and-technology enterprise. Backed by a reported $100 million-a-year deal with Oracle.

They’ve also hired Dane Glasgow, a veteran of Meta, Google, and eBay, as Chief Product Officer — working with Cindy Holland on DTC, ads, immersive, and AI. If you’re serious about product-led media, that’s the hire you make.

So the ingredients are there: Ellison brings the capital, Oracle the infrastructure, Glasgow the product muscle. That’s the promise.

The harder question is what they’ll actually do with it.

We keep hearing how they’re “bringing tech to the studio,” but none of the specifics. So I looked at what Oracle is already doing for Hollywood right now — thinking maybe I could find the clues there…

What Oracle Actually Brings

• Searchable libraries: AI turns buried footage into usable inventory — converting dead archives into living assets.

• Studio-in-the-Cloud: Production shifts off hardware into rented computing power that scales up or down with projects.

• Delivery and personalization: Oracle manages encoding, encrypting, and streaming. Paired with audience data, it can learn how people watch and feed that back into programming and marketing.

• Enterprise + consumer brain: Oracle’s old strength was the back office; now it connects to audience data. The idea is one system linking what a studio makes to how viewers engage. Whether that builds loyalty or just better recommendations depends on what Paramount does with it.

In short, Oracle can be the operating system for vertical media — but Paramount has to design the layer that turns data into belonging.

What’s missing are declared verticals — distinct audience ecosystems with their own P&Ls, memberships, and commerce layers. That’s the leap from modernized horizontal to true vertical.

What “Going Vertical” Looks Like

A vertical is an audience-centric ecosystem built on:

• A cultural spine: a world people already care about.

• Membership and identity: a branded layer of status and access.

• A product ladder: from free to premium, spanning digital and physical.

• Creator integration: fan and creator collaborations that seed new IP.

• Live anchors: recurring events that gather the community.

• Feedback loops: data flowing between content, product, and commerce so every touchpoint strengthens the next.

Oracle can power the data. Glasgow’s team can build the surface. But the soul of a vertical is community — rituals, participation, belonging.

Paramount as a Portfolio That Holds Verticals

Paramount could evolve into a horizontal company that holds a portfolio of verticals — distinct cultural worlds with their own creative, commercial, and community engines.

Each vertical has its own GM, its own P&L, and shared back-office support for identity, payments, data, and media ops. Content still funnels back to Paramount+, but fans come for the worlds they love — and stay because they feel part of them.

Just like the old cable bundle, subscribers get access to multiple verticals (and pay the premium for it) — but they’re really focused on the one that defines them.

Going vertical doesn’t mean leaving casual fans behind — it means formalizing the relationship with the ones who care most.

Casuals still drop in for Top Gun 3 or a UFC fight. But verticals organize everything else — film, TV, commerce, live events — around the audience that identifies with the brand. Casuals watch; core fans belong. The studio becomes a living ecosystem.

How to Build Them

I see it in three fronts:

1. Build from what’s already working. Start with the worlds that already have loyal audiences. Don’t just make more — design systems around them.

2. Buy the audience, not the asset. Acquire communities with existing trust and participation, then layer in content later.

3. Build from the culture out. Anchor around the identity or values that hold the audience together, even when the IP shifts.

Applying Theory: The Perfect Move

If Paramount wanted to prove what a vertical strategy looks like in practice, there’s a single, perfect test case sitting in plain sight: buy Teton Ridge.

A couple months back, I wrote an Open Gardens stack about Teton Ridge — a privately funded media, sports, and lifestyle company quietly doing exactly what I’m talking about: building a full-stack cultural vertical. It owns The American Rodeo, controls its broadcast rights, runs equestrian and ranching events, sells Western lifestyle products, and is developing creator-led content, movies and TV shows around the same world.

In short, they bought the Openverse of cowboy culture to take reigns on its community.

They didn’t start with a show — they started with a world. They built the infrastructure of belonging first: the fans, the athletes, the events, the merch, the myth. Content became one spoke in a much bigger wheel.

Now imagine tying that to Yellowstone and its orbit.

Paramount doesn’t own Taylor Sheridan, and it doesn’t own his audience — it rents them for as long as he keeps making the shows. That’s the horizontal trap.

But combine Sheridan’s storytelling universe with Teton Ridge’s cultural backbone — the rodeo, the brands, the live events, the creator layer — and you get a vertical. CBS and Paramount+ get the live sports, docs and scripted content. They monetize the live events, the experiential, the commerce. And the studio gets something far more valuable than another hit: ownership of the culture itself.

That’s what going vertical looks like in the real world — not more content, but deeper gravity.

After I wrote the Teton Ridge stack, CEO Deirdre Lester reached out on LinkedIn and told me it was:

“the closest anyone’s come to describing what we are doing.”

She’s an impressive exec — sharp, grounded, and completely fluent in this idea of building from community outward. We eventually connected on zoom, and it was clear this thinking isn’t strategy-deck talk for her; it’s instinct. So of course, I asked if they’d ever considered selling to someone like Paramount. Her answer was fascinating… and not something I would share.

But rodeo isn’t the only play. You could build a vertical around Mission: Impossible — not just movies, but the entire culture of spycraft: immersive training, escape-room events, creator collabs that turn stunts into participatory entertainment. Or build one around Transformers — a robotics vertical connecting fandom, maker culture and subscription businesses, live robotics shows… I’m oversampling but you get the idea.

Done right, these aren’t franchises; they’re ecosystems. Communities that gather there can be monetized a thousand ways — through live experiences, commerce, creators, education, and media — and they grow far beyond the lifespan of any single story.

Nobody Asked Me, But There—I Said It

I’ve had multiple conversations lately with bankers in the entertainment space asking where capital is actually seeking opportunity right now.

Are investors starting to build business plans around verticals like Teton Ridge — companies that own culture, not just content?

The answer I keep getting is: it’s hard to model.

You’re going to buy an anchor business like a rodeo to build community… but eventually sell that community cowboy boots?

That’s the part the spreadsheets can’t process.

Horizontal growth still fits neatly into a financial model — output, windows, international projections, the legacy math everyone knows. But how do you model belonging? How do you forecast connection?

I get it. It’s hard. But the behavior is already changing, and the industry can’t spreadsheet its way into the future. The companies that figure this out first — the ones willing to take big, uncomfortable swings — will define the next era.

A24 already is a vertical — a handmade brand that grew by going deep instead of wide. Its next move isn’t to act like a studio; it’s to strengthen the community it already owns — to scale intimacy, not output.

Paramount’s opportunity is different. It’s not a vertical — it’s a platform that could hold them.

Instead of behaving like one giant pipeline, it could evolve into a portfolio of verticals: spy culture, Western culture, robotics, music — each with its own community, commerce, and creative spine.

The cleanest way to frame it is this:

Use the library to seed worlds. Use the worlds to seed communities.
Use the communities to seed products, events, and stories that feel inevitable — because they were born inside the culture you’re stewarding.

AI is about to make more content trivial. The scarce thing will be meaning. Build for that.

And here’s where it comes full circle: what studio should buy A24? (Their valuation is probably too high now, but go with me — I’m just trying to bring some symmetry to the end of this stack!).

If I were Paramount, I’d do it — not to integrate it, but to grow it.

This isn’t Universal owning a prestige arm like Focus or Disney buying Miramax to check a box on taste.

It’s something different — a structural play, not a symbolic one.

Let A24 remain its own vertical — powered by Paramount’s tech and infrastructure, not absorbed by them.

Let it be the cultural lab, the taste engine, the handmade brand inside the machine.

Let it grow its community with depth — that’s how you get to its best EBITDA, not by chasing volume.

Because maybe the next great M&E avalanche won’t come from studios buying each other — but from studios assembling portfolios of verticals that each own a community.

Keep an eye on the mega-creators — Dhar Mann, Dude Perfect, MrBeast — the usual suspects. They’re already doing it.

As the legacy world and the creator world converge in the open garden, that just might be where the next empire will rise.

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FRESH CLIPPINGS

From Repping Creators to Running Them

WME is launching Creator Labs, an in-house digital operations team inside its Digital Division that will help clients build and run media businesses on YouTube and elsewhere. The team starts with ideation, then moves into channel management, posting, scheduling, syndication, and distribution, so a creator can build a subscriber base without staffing up a full production company. WME also made a strategic investment in video operations company Astra Media, which has powered projects for clients like Khloe Kardashian and Kevin Hart, and expanded its creator sales team to bring in more brand sponsorships. Early users include Erling Haaland, who used the team to land sponsorships for his YouTube channel, and Julian Shapiro-Barnum, who did the same for the launch of his late night show.

Ben Davis, co-head of the digital group, framed the reasoning well. Clients now own their distribution, so what does an agent do? His colleague Jad Dayeh added that YouTube has taken the pieces of what used to be a network and put them in the creator’s hands. Creator Labs is the answer to both these questions.

It also follows through on something WME said when CAA announced its $250 million Compound fund. WME’s view then was that the bigger opportunity sits in services that help talent own more of what they build. Compound buys into creator businesses, while Creator Labs helps creators run them.

We will see which approach creators prefer.

Fox Staffs Up for Creators

Fox is adding two senior executives to Fox Creator Studios, the division we have followed since Billy Parks took the helm. Bryan Thoensen joins from TikTok, where he led content partnerships, and will develop creator franchises across the studio as senior VP of content partnerships. Kirsten McAuliffe, a veteran of Moonbug and Warner Bros. Discovery, becomes senior VP of strategic partnerships and growth and will run commercial strategy.

Thoensen will report to Parks on the creative side. McAuliffe to Katrina Cukaj, who runs entertainment advertising sales. Fox is hiring one person to build the franchises and another to sell them to advertisers, and the stated goal from Cukaj is to make Fox the premier destination for brands that want to invest in the creator economy.

Along with the Roku acquisition and Tubi’s creator partnerships, it’s clear that Fox wants the distribution, the creator relationships, and the advertiser conversation all under one roof.

The Creator Economy Goes Live

Live Nation is backing a new company called Creator Nation, led by Alexis and Scott Fisher, who both built management firms early in the creator world. Alexis founded Timeline Management, which Live Nation acquired in 2024, and Scott founded Select Management Group, which sold to Propagate. Creator Nation will support creators with content, commerce, brand partnerships, and live experiences, and plans to acquire management firms and adjacent businesses while giving them resources many of them never had.

The service model works like a restaurant menu. A creator picks what they need, and no one has to sign on for full management to get help building a live show. The target range is wide. Scott described the top 500 YouTubers, and also a mom in Utah who makes $5 million a year from an affiliate business.

GARDEN VIEW

Business of TV

YouTube views and why we shouldn’t compare them to TV

Last week I asked which subject you’d like me to do a live video chat on - Instagram for TV or microdramas - and the answer was… Instagram for TV, which I’ll do as a session on Friday for paid subscribers…

Listen now

a month ago · 8 likes · 2 comments · Jen Topping

Have a great weekend.

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Welcome to The Vertical Bloom, a weekly dive into the fast-growing world of microseries and vertical storytelling. Here, we unpack the platforms, creators, and deals shaping the format that’s redefining what it means to make and watch scripted content in the mobile age.

This week, we’re giving special attention to Daniel Kolitz’s New York Times Magazine feature, Are Microdramas the Future of Hollywood, or the End? It’s a provocative look at an industry that’s attracting plenty of attention, investment, and debate. We give our thoughts and perhaps an alternate perspective.

Plus, Lifetime expands its vertical slate, Hollywood veterans discuss the business of microdramas, and more.

But first...

I am endlessly impressed by creative people.

And since this thing is about the vertical world, I’ll speak about the creative people who inhabit this particular aspect ratio.

The people in front of the camera, behind the camera, behind the computer screens that contain the call sheets for the crews as they rally on an unforgiving Tuesday night.

All the artists. All the logisticians. All the sweaty grips. All the people yearning for that thing they came to this adventure for.

This whole vertical world is full of them.

I think it’s easy to look at some of the work that’s come out of this space and assume that’s what these artists want to make. Or, through more jaded eyes, perhaps those of newspaper writers whose set visits were far too short, assume that this is all they’ve resigned themselves to ever making.

But that’s not the truth.

That’s not what any of these people came to this journey for.

And on the screens of social media, I think they’ll get their chance soon enough.

And we’ll all discover what this medium is truly capable of.

Alright, let’s get into it.

Are 60-Second Microdramas the Future of Hollywood, or the End?

The New York Times Magazine takes a deep dive into the booming microdrama industry, examining its rapid growth, unconventional production practices, and uneasy relationship with traditional Hollywood. Daniel Kolitz asks whether the format represents an exciting new frontier for storytelling or something more troubling for the entertainment industry. It’s a provocative look at a format that’s attracting plenty of attention, investment, and debate, and one we’re responding to in this week’s deep dive.

A+E Global Media and Lifetime Expand Their Microdrama Slate

A+E Global Media and Lifetime are doubling down on vertical storytelling, launching three original microdramas from Microhouse Films alongside seven adaptations from their existing library. Lifetime plans to add new vertical titles every two weeks, with up to seven originals by year-end. Meanwhile, A+E is bringing nearly 200 adapted titles to MIPCOM for international licensing, including content from Cold Case Files, Alone, and Married at First Sight. It’s a significant push into both original vertical production and the repackaging of established IP.

Fox Entertainment Global Brings Microdramas to MIPCOM

Fox Entertainment Global is bringing microdramas and creator-led programming to MIPCOM as part of its expanding international sales strategy. Fox’s existing deal with Holywater calls for 200 microdramas over two years, alongside a separate agreement for 40 scripted projects with YouTube creator Dhar Mann. The company is also exploring traditional television distribution for its microdramas, treating their 70- to 90-minute runtimes as potential TV movies. Another sign that vertical storytelling is becoming part of Hollywood’s broader distribution business.

Microdrama Founders Say Hollywood Has Come Knocking

At TheWrap’s TheGrill conference, leaders from Mansa, Shortical, and aTwist discussed how microdramas are creating new opportunities as traditional Hollywood production contracts. Mansa co-founders David Oyelowo and Nate Parker shared production budgets of $100,000 to $250,000 per project, while Shortical CEO Guy Shimoni said his company is targeting $100 million in revenue this year, fueled partly by AI-generated content. The conversation highlighted the format’s increasingly varied approaches to financing, production, and talent development.

It’s Tempting to Say We’re Screwed

On microdramas and the case for optimism.

In January, Daniel Kolitz visited our office at Second Rodeo while reporting his recent New York Times piece on microdramas. We weren’t ultimately included in the article, but having read it, I wanted to offer another perspective.

Many of his criticisms are valid. Poorly developed scripts, unrealistic budgets and schedules, troubling portrayals of women, and business models that prioritize engagement over storytelling are just a handful of his points that I totally agree with.

While I share his concerns about AI replacing artists and the commodification of human creativity, (I’m a fairly young and therefore expectedly jaded individual, with plenty of anxiety about the future of entertainment; and, frankly, the world) I believe there’s reason to be hopeful.

I can confirm the problems with microdramas are real, as are the creativity, ambition, and extraordinary amounts of craft going into making them.

Actors memorize staggering amounts of dialogue and then somehow deliver beautifully authentic performances with the words they just speed-ingested. Script supervisors manage continuity under the pressure of knowing there are no chances for pick ups after wrap. Crews find extraordinary solutions to problems that could never have been imagined on a legacy set.

I don’t mean to romanticize, and I want to be clear when it comes to the unacceptable conditions of some of these sets (though gratefully I have never been on a set like this myself): It is imperative that we continue to advocate for better budgets, safer sets, and more sustainable schedules.

But there is something about that grit and determination of the people who make it happen that I’ve always admired in independent filmmaking. The ability to make something out of nothing. That is creativity. And microdrama sets are the epitome of it.

Kolitz himself describes a prop team proudly guarding the secret of a practical effect they’d pulled off under enormous time pressure. That determination is something I’ve witnessed time and time again, and it makes me see the state of this sector through a more optimistic lens.

During pickups (a luxury that I’m aware most productions in this space aren’t afforded) for our musical microdrama PLAYBACK, our cinematographer proudly showed me how he was able to capture the light in this one shot. We were in a Los Angeles warehouse, carefully recreating a sequence originally filmed on a stage in Mexico. We had already shot coverage for that moment. We didn’t strictly need to do it again, but we had a rare opportunity to make it better.

And we did. Because that’s what artists do.

An actor once reached out to Scott because he was excited by the quality of the pages he saw posted in the casting breakdown. He’d found a character he could really sink his teeth into. Another actress essentially taught herself to pole dance overnight to add authenticity to her performance.

We’ve heard from writers who say the format has stretched them creatively, forcing them to use familiar storytelling muscles in entirely new ways. This year, Sundance Collab and TikTok launched a four-week micro-series screenwriting program, recognizing that this format is a craft worth studying and developing.

I’m also encouraged by the opportunities this medium is creating for women in filmmaking. Look at Kristen Brancaccio, who has directed more than 20 microdramas, including Issa Rae’s Screen Time, and has now been tapped to direct her first feature film, Crush Party. Or Carin Smolinski, who moved from acting in verticals into writing, directing, and producing her own work, motivated in part by a desire to create stronger female characters and better creative environments.

I also want to give the microdrama audience it’s credit. There’s a long history of dismissing media women love, particularly romance and fantasy. While some platforms undoubtedly employ manipulative tactics, that shouldn’t diminish the genuine enthusiasm of an audience finally seeing more entertainment catered to its interests.

Let me be clear: I am not defending every trope. Some are deeply troubling, and there are stories we at Second Rodeo simply won’t make because they fundamentally conflict with our values. I just want to highlight that there’s something sex-positive about entertainment that takes women’s romantic and sexual fantasies seriously.

There are many more encouraging developments: The aforementioned Sundance Collab and TikTok micro-series writing program submissions prohibited generative AI-use in any way. SAG-AFTRA has introduced protections for qualifying independent vertical productions. And Luminate’s April research found growing skepticism toward AI-written entertainment among American audiences.

And make no mistake, the people funding and commissioning these productions have a responsibility to protect human creativity, improve working conditions, and respect their audiences. And I believe that that audience will be holding them accountable for those choices, with their dollars and their attention.

But at Second Rodeo, our mission is to elevate this medium, and I know we’re not the only ones.

I’ve met too many talented people who are determined to make better work, improve their craft, and push this industry forward to believe that its current limitations define its future.

So to everyone working in microdramas I hope you read this and know that I believe in us.

And to Daniel Kolitz: Thank you for shining a light to the world on the things that need addressing as we continue to evolve this medium to be the thing we believe it can be.

I believe this sector will create some of the most influential entertainment of our generation.

And it is tempting to say we’re screwed. But there’s a world in which instead we’re witnessing a very imperfect beginning to something extraordinary. And I have faith in the artists who are determined to make it so.

That’s it for this week’s Vertical Bloom.

We’re excited to keep building this into a weekly home for the ideas, experiments, and creative voices shaping vertical storytelling in real time.

We’ll be back next Thursday with more headlines, more analysis, and another look at where this medium is headed.

See you then.

Editor: Scott Brown

Writer: Franziska Harms

Welcome to OG: Approved—where rule-breaking creators shape the future. Hand-picked by Open Gardens, they’re not following the playbook—they’re writing the next one.

Name: Family Dinner

Instagram: 102K Followers

Youtube: 11.2K Subscribers

What is Family Dinner?

Family Dinner is a new sitcom style web series from Lee Citron and Trevor Worley, two filmmakers who have been making comedy together since film school.

Citron and Worley both went to AFI, where Citron directed and Worley produced Martian American, a comedy about a lonely Martian trying to start a life in Los Angeles. The short won first place for comedy at the College Television Awards and sent both of them into more traditional film and television careers.

Citron went on to direct series for BratTV and TruTV. Worley stayed on the producing side and eventually built Podhead Studios in Los Angeles.

Then they created VHS Dates.

The premise focused on fake dating-service tapes from the 1980s, shot convincingly enough that plenty of viewers thought Citron and Worley had actually found an archive of lonely singles looking for love. They committed to the bit hard enough that a New York Times reporter initially believed the tapes were real. The series was later selected for Tribeca NOW in 2026.

VHS Dates had originally been a pitch that went nowhere. So they decided to make it themselves.

Family Dinner is much closer to the kind of television Citron and Worley trained to make. There is a recurring cast, episodes and a crew.

The nuance is in how they are putting it out. Scenes from the full episodes are released across Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube Shorts, so somebody can stumble onto Family Dinner the same way they would any other comedy reel and discover there is an actual show behind it.

Citron and Worley already made the sitcom. Rather than leave it sitting on a hard drive while they take meetings, they are putting scenes in front of people now and letting the audience discover the larger show behind them.

Three Things We Love About Family Dinner

The scenes can stand on their own: A clip can work as a complete joke in the feed without feeling like a chopped-up trailer for something else. If you like the characters, there is a full sitcom waiting behind it.

They understand how to create curiosity around a world: VHS Dates worked because people wanted to know who these strange characters were and whether any of it was real. Family Dinner is more traditional, but Citron and Worley are still good at giving you just enough of a character or situation to make you want another scene.

They are testing whether a sitcom can build from the audience out: Instead of waiting for a network to manufacture awareness after the fact, they already have the show and are letting people find it scene by scene.

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As I was exploring microdramas for my own company, I tried to meet with every platform in town. That eventually led me to MicroCo—now aTwist.

They told me what they were looking for, and I pitched a few ideas that seemed to intrigue them. They also wanted to explore comedy, which almost no one in microdramas was doing at the time. So I suggested they meet with Jon Stern, an old friend and former producing partner of mine. Jon is a prolific writer-producer of low-budget comedy series including Wet Hot American Summer and Childrens’ Hospital, plus much more. He has exactly the right mix of curiosity and chutzpah. It turned out Susan Rovner (one of its founders) and Jon went way back.

They passed on my ideas, hired Jon, and I didn’t even get 10 percent. Karma points, maybe.

So I guilted him into writing about the experience. Then, just to torture him, I made him rewrite it three times.

Today, a seasoned (i.e., old) comedy writer-producer on what he learned making—wait for it—My Billionaire Kidney.

And yeah, it’s pretty damn funny. Watch it at aTwist. At least the first seven episodes that are free.

Ben Odell, Substack-in-Chief.

The Executive Rejected My Pitch—Then Asked for a Kidney

Does a vertical have to be a melodrama? What about a comedy? Combine comedy with short-form and ultra-low-budget and I’m right at home. Also, I’m unqualified for every genre except comedy (and even that is highly debatable).

After a decade producing low-budget indie films, I discovered the world of “web series” (that’s what we used to call YouTube videos when “streamer” was only a term used in pornography). I noticed that exponentially more people were viewing these shorts than any indie film I’d ever made.

So twenty years later, I’m still doing it. In the form of a vertical for a new American-based vertical company called aTwist, started by TV execs Susan Rovner, Jana Winograde and Lloyd Braun. They raised some real money to launch a platform and commission original series.

Susan asked me to make a comedy. I pitched her a handful of ideas from my drawer of aborted movie script concepts. She didn’t outright verbalize “meh,” but I got the message. Then she added, “Why don’t you just do a parody of a microdrama,” which was the right path.

But how do you parody something that – let’s be honest – so often feels like a parody already, even if unintentionally? I wasn’t sure I could crack it.

First step: ingest a bunch of existing microdramas, many of them from other countries. I jotted down bits as I watched. I needed a premise, no matter how thin, to build a structure around. How about kidney donations?

Nothing gets a laugh like someone needing an organ transplant.

My Billionaire Kidney.

I wrote a season outline and the first ten pages.

Susan convincingly acted as if she liked it. aTwist gave me a standard vertical series budget and instructions to make at least 35 episodes totaling 60 minutes.

I hired myself to be the writer, director and producer through my production company, Abominable Pictures. Doing all these jobs at once was necessary to make the most of our resources. (In other words, there wasn’t enough money to hire someone better.)

This had a remarkable parallel to my first endeavor with Susan. Eighteen years and three corporate owners ago, Susan was an exec at Warner Bros. Television. Rob Cordry, David Wain and I talked WBTV out of a little cash to make Childrens’ Hospital, a web series for a short-lived Warner Brothers digital platform. Its low-stakes under-the-radar-ness allowed us to drop our inner censor and just try something different. That led to a slate of low-budget parodies as well as other alt comedies.

Which brings us back to My Billionaire Kidney. As you’re no doubt aware, microdramas are required to end each episode with a cliffhanger…

And what I’m about to tell you will BLOW YOUR MIND!

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Four Unions, Four Days, and Very Few Shirts

My gameplan was to combine my specific mainstream producing M.O. with the scale of a vertical. Starting with the unions…

Since I’m DGA and WGA we had to go that way. It was an IATSE crew because I appreciate the benefits of working with these great people from so many other Abominable Pictures productions, large and small. Kidney was quantifiably more efficient, more collaborative, and more fun because of this team. Also, I believe everyone should get health insurance.

The other union was SAG-AFTRA. Shooting in Los Angeles comes with an enormous advantage: the best pool of comedic talent in the world lives here. If you want access to that pool, you need to be a SAG-AFTRA production. And if you want to be truly accessible to these actors, it’s vital to shoot locally.

All the unions have structures for low-budget new media that applied to Kidney. Some have too much paperwork, if you ask me, but it enabled me to work with a bunch of people I already know and love as well as some that I had always wanted to work with.

I figured a four-day shoot – 15 pages per day – would be the right speed to fit the budget and to make the commitment more doable for the actors.

To fit that schedule, I wrote to three locations (including my house and my son’s school, to save money), with each location playing for three or more sets. Day exteriors are the fastest to shoot and light. Day interiors are in second position. Night scenes were not even on the table.

I experimented with iPad teleprompters to help speed things up and take the memorization pressure off the actors. It turns out that verticals and teleprompters are as good together as Laverne & Shirley. Or if you’re under 50, I guess Rhett & Link.

Because these things are so cutty, an actor rarely had to deliver more than one or two lines in a row. Plus, given the vertical format, the prompters could be very close to the actors and still out of frame.

It wouldn’t matter how smoothly the production ran if the show wasn’t funny, though. There are a bunch of common microdrama tropes that made me laugh:

• Throwing a drink at someone

• Cutting to a fancy watch to illustrate how wealthy someone is (in Kidney, the more wealth, the more watches)

• Knocking something out of someone’s hand (do people ever do this in real life?)

• Having a man take his shirt off to impress a woman

• Proposing marriage fast and loose

• Introducing pretty much every character by starting at their shoes and tilting up (I guess you can tell a lot about someone by their shoes?)

• Cringey sex scenes

• Characters having only two modes of transportation: private jet or the back seat of a limo

• Characters introducing themselves by running through their bio as if they’re in a job interview in an elevator

• Every male romantic interest having a scary, dark side

• People dropping and shattering their drinks whenever something dramatic happens (I learned that characters breaking things on purpose is a satisfying way to wrap a show.)

There’s another common trope I played with. Prepare yourself. What I’m about to tell you… COULD CHANGE YOUR LIFE!

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I Heard His Inner Thoughts—and They Were All in Extreme Close-Up

A unique device in microdramas is hearing the inner thoughts of every character via voiceover.

A lot of narratives shortcuts happen there.

Kidney would need to do this too, but only for jokes. Before we started filming, I wasn’t sure if it would play better for the actor to look neutral while VOing or whether their expressions should reflect what they were thinking. I was planning to shoot it both ways. After the first scene, it became clear they should act out every thought.

Through trial and error, we picked up formal guidelines too. At lunch on the first day, our DP Frank Barrera and AD Julian Petrillo and I put our heads together. We all come from traditional TV (often working together), so these observations might seem obvious to an experienced vertical director (i.e. – not me):

• Master shots are almost always useless.

• Action works better moving from foreground to background and vice-versa, rather than left-to-right, since there is hardly any left or right in the frame to work with.

• Characters enter a scene, plant themselves in a group, and deliver their dialogue completely before moving. Basically, no walk-and-talks.

• Just shoot medium-wide shots and blow up to MS, CU or ECU in post. Once I started taking advantage of that in the edit, I recognized that traditional TV was missing out. Thanks to the visual language of the genre, there’s no limits on the exploitation of push-ins, snap-zooms, jump cuts, irises and stings.

• Even two-shots can be punched in to be two singles. But two-shots don’t work so well anyway, except as 50-50s.

• Camera moves can be difficult to watch on an iPhone screen. Fast camera moves even more so.

• One stop-and-go take with pickups became the default for each setup.

Tone. Every project has its own tone, no matter what genre. A movie or TV show will have table reads and rehearsals. Sometimes it takes a TV series an entire season to land on it. You need alt readings in the edit. We didn’t have time to do that on Kidney. If you ask me the biggest challenge, it was expediting the tone-journey.

Here comes the EXCITING CONCLUSIONS!

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The Blog Post Finale

Going into this, my “dramatic question” was: Can the short-form serialized format work creatively for comedy AND find an audience. Can the jokes work for an audience unfamiliar with microdramas as well as the microdramas faithful? Will people enjoy poking fun at the very format they also take seriously?

It’s too soon to tell about the audience.

If you ask me, however, I’m now convinced that this format is tailor-made for comedy. Episodes’ shortness aren’t dissimilar than the length of a standard TV scene, or a Funny or Die short, or a sketch comedy piece.

We all are already using our iPhones for quick hits while we’re waiting in line (or, in the case of my kids, riding in the car, eating dinner, or having any conversation with me). That seems to me to be the perfect viewer to enjoy quick, funny bits.

How to monetize is an open question. The microdramas model relies on serialization. Though Kidney pretends to have a driving narrative, it’s really just the pretense of one. I tried to pull the viewer along by regularly introducing new characters and different sets, but are people going to spend money to see what happens next? Maybe the comedy verticals will adapt to be more ad-driven or subscriber-based.

As for my creative experience, the limits were assets, as is so often the case. It forced me to focus on the jokes and the viewer experience. To be efficient with the words, images and editing. To try things I wouldn’t otherwise have the opportunity for.

There always needs to be an under-the-radar way to experiment and develop ideas. If we do this enough, new voices and material are guaranteed to break out.

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FRESH CLIPPINGS

Disney Opens El Capitan to Creators

Disney held an event called Created in LA last week that effectively functioned like the unveiling of a creator operating strategy. Monica Kahn and Josh Lawson each gave a solid breakdown.

The event itself was built by Jon Youshaei, a former YouTube and Instagram executive turned creator, who pitched Disney on the idea of premiering creator-made videos as actual feature films on the big screen. Night one took place at the El Capitan Theatre, where The Sticks and Zach King premiered new work in a setting usually reserved for studio releases.

Dana Walden, Disney’s President and Chief Creative Officer, told the room that creators understand their audiences intimately and adjust in real time in a way traditional production never could. Asad Ayaz, Disney’s Chief Brand Officer, made an even more pointed observation the next day on the studio lot: Disney itself was started by a creator, a storyteller who began with shorts and expanded into movies, products, and an entire theme park world. A century later, the same studio is applying that same model to today’s creators.

Sounds like a lot of marketing. And it is…

But there was some substance too.

The following day on the lot, Ayaz laid out actual pathways into Disney projects for creators, spanning scripted series, features, and brand campaigns. Dhar Mann broke down what it actually takes to run his operation, 65 sets and 10 crews shipping five TV-length episodes a week.

When Open Gardens first started almost two years ago, I remember trying to reframe the conversation from creators as a distribution channel to creators as the media itself. And now, here we are.

It will be interesting to see how Disney puts all of this into action moving forward.

101 Studios Bets on the Next Bourdain

101 Studios, the company behind Yellowstone and Tulsa King, is getting into the food content business. The studio is launching Yes Chef Studios in partnership with Yes Chef Group, founded by Jack Goldburg and Liam Henning, and committing up to $25 million to the venture. Goldburg is the creator behind Jack’s Dining Room, a food and travel program with over a million YouTube subscribers and three million Instagram followers.

101 CEO David Glasser was direct about what he was looking for. He has scripted TV, feature film, and unscripted all covered, but had never cracked food. He had been hunting for the next Anthony Bourdain, and found a creator who was not a one-hit wonder, but someone building a loyal audience.

Yes Chef Studios will produce long-form scripted and unscripted programming around food, culture, travel, and hospitality, with the goal of eventually selling projects to major streamers or networks. But just as important, finding and developing the next generation of food creators. Glasser described wanting to identify who the other Jacks are and bring them into the fold the same way.

Goldburg’s own framing of the partnership is interesting, though, because it’s always the legacy studios that have something to gain, and the question of does the creator even need legacy always comes circling around. He sees 101’s production expertise, directing talent, and Hollywood relationships as the missing piece that turns a loyal YouTube following into something that can truly stand out in a market where everyone has access to everything. Together, as he put it, it’s game over for competitors trying to do this piecemeal.

What makes this particularly interesting is Glasser’s framing of it as a test case for more creator deals. Jack’s Dining Room could become the template for how the studio (and other copycats) approaches creator-led deals more broadly. So instead of pitching one idea to a streamer and hoping it lands, he’s inviting creators to come be part of a factory built specifically to cross them over into long-form content.

Cracks in Netflix's Creator Push

Lucas Shaw reported in his newsletter that YouTube has successfully gotten at least one major creator to reconsider a deal with Netflix. Nick DiGiovanni, the chef with more than 46 million YouTube subscribers, has told Netflix he wants to revisit the agreement they announced just a couple of months ago.

DiGiovanni was one of the first big YouTube stars to agree to post new videos simultaneously on both platforms, a day-and-date arrangement that we have covered as one of the more aggressive moves in Netflix’s creator push. According to Lucas’s reporting, YouTube has been actively pushing back against these deals, offering creators financial incentives to keep YouTube as their primary outlet, alongside other kinds of consequences such as reduced visibility at events like Brandcast, loss of preferred advertising access, and so on.

DiGiovanni has not made a final decision it seems. Netflix, for its part, is caught in an uncomfortable position. It does not want to let talent out of signed deals and risk an exodus, but it also does not want to launch this entire creator strategy surrounded by partners who already feel burned.

This is worth keeping tabs on. If DiGiovanni successfully walks back his Netflix deal, it becomes a real test case for how much leverage YouTube’s retention strategy actually has, and whether the big checks and implicit threats are enough to pull creators back from deals they already signed.

GARDEN VIEW

HARVEST QUOTE

"NFLX has lacked big original series and it's showing."

— Wells Fargo analyst Steven Cahall

As we’ve covered here in the past few weeks / months, Steven sees the recent push into YouTube-style podcasts, short-form video, and influencer content as a potential distraction from the thing that actually drives subscriptions in the first place. His framing is blunt: if the ambition is to turn Netflix into a broader content hub, the risk is losing sight of the watercooler moments that built the brand to begin with will affect is.

He recently downgraded the stock…

Have a great weekend.

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Welcome to OG: Approved—where rule-breaking creators shape the future. Hand-picked by Open Gardens, they’re not following the playbook—they’re writing the next one.

Name: Biggey Bailey

Instagram: 1.8 Million Followers

Youtube: 783K Subscribers

Who is Biggy Bailey?

In the honor of the NFL season moving into high gear along with the MLB playoff’s kicking off, let’s dig into another sports creator.

Enter Biggy Bailey.

Biggy Bailey used to call himself Biggy Cook the Book, which tells you a lot about where this started.

Bailey is from Chattanooga, Tennessee, and his first audience came through sports betting. He talked football, odds, picks, and the usual arguments that keep sports fans occupied. In 2022, Cook the Book landed a spot in Underdog Fantasy’s creator incubator.

Bailey has become a sketch comedian who happens to know sports really well. College football and the NFL still give him plenty to work with, but the characters have spread into family, dating, Southern life, youth sports, pop culture, work, and whatever else catches his attention.

Knowing sports from the inside lets him move quickly without sounding like someone who just read the headline. When a player, coach, fan base, or college football storyline suddenly becomes the conversation, Bailey already knows the people he wants to make fun of.

Plenty of the videos have nothing to do with sports at all now, which is probably the clearest indication of where the account has gone. People may have first found him through football, but they stayed for Biggy.

He has recently started pushing into long-form YouTube videos. Bailey and videographer William McCutcheon released 17 longer videos in about six months and passed a million combined views.

His development is interesting because the sketches are still the entry point to Biggy’s world. TikTok and Instagram let him post quickly while YouTube lets the bigger ideas develop and breathe.

NBC tested that part before YouTube really did.

Bailey joined Destination X in 2025, where he was still being introduced as a sports bettor and content creator from Chattanooga. He had barely traveled internationally before signing up for a reality competition based largely on figuring out where in Europe you had been dropped.

He made the final three anyway.

The social accounts now live under Biggy Bailey. Sports are the heart, but the comedy kept expanding, television introduced him to people who had never seen the sketches and YouTube is giving him a bigger canvas to build out a world around him.

Three Things We Love About Biggy Bailey

He followed the comedy instead of protecting the niche: Bailey had a recognizable sports-betting brand and could have stayed there. Instead, he let the sketches get broader while keeping the sports knowledge that made the early work credible.

He is already working on the jump to long-form: The YouTube videos give Bailey more than sixty seconds to carry something. Trips, sports events, other personalities, and longer situations let the audience spend time with him instead of only the character in the sketch.

Destination X showed the guy underneath the account: Reality TV removed most of the tools Bailey controls online. He still made the final three with viewers watching him as himself.

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This week, El Juicio, a show my company 3Pas Studios produced in Mexico, in Spanish, reached #4 in the world on Amazon. We were doing a little victory lap.

Then I attended an event full of some of the most powerful agents, managers and executives in Hollywood. They all seemed to know each other. I knew only a few of them.

I’ve spent much of my career making content for US Hispanic and Latin American audiences. My accomplishments tend to live outside their rubrics of measurement. The reaction was what it has so often been: indifference. At times, rudeness.

I introduced myself to one agent who asked about my credentials. After I answered, he nodded and literally walked away.

Going from celebrating a show reaching audiences around the world to a room where that work barely registered was familiar. It brought me back to one of our first meetings when Eugenio Derbez and I were launching 3Pas Studios.

Eugenio had just made Instructions Not Included, a $5.5 million movie that earned over $100 million at the worldwide box office. He had been a major star in Mexico and among US Latino audiences for years. But at 50, after 25 years of work, he had finally become an overnight success in the eyes of Hollywood.

We were looking for a first-look deal to pay our overhead and get us started. The president of one of the major studios greeted us at his door. As we sat down, he pointed to Eugenio and said, “You, I want to meet.” Then he looked at me and said, “You, I don’t give a shit about. Sit over there.” He pointed me to a chair off to one side and literally didn’t acknowledge me the rest of the meeting.

In his defense, not that I feel the need to defend him, I had spent ten years as a screenwriter in Colombia, another ten producing small films independently, mostly in Spanish, and five years running production for Lionsgate’s Latino label, Pantelion Films. My credentials meant nothing to someone producing billion-dollar franchises.

The caste system was clear. His rudeness was acceptable, even expected.

When I was in college, social life at this small liberal arts school was built entirely around the Greek system. I pledged a fraternity, the Animal House of its time. They were literally disbanded a few years after I graduated. Pledging was brutal and humiliating. The worst part was taking orders from the fraternity brothers you least respected. They were always the most abusive.

In those situations, I imagined a little man sitting on my shoulder who was actually the target of the abuse. Made it easier. And he never left my shoulder as I moved to Los Angeles. Arrogance and ego has been a baseline to our industry. It was an unspoken law that you watched the movie Swimming for Sharks to prepare for it.

Im not sure it ever really served our industry but it certainly doesn’t now.

When I get passionate about something, I tend to lose objectivity. I can only see the positives. My wife reminds me of this all the time. And I have to be cautious about my love affair with the creator economy because I’m definitely in the honeymoon phase.

But as I’ve become closer to its architects and creators themselves, one thing I’ve noticed among many of the most successful is humility.

Last year I went to a Press Publish event in New York City. I dreaded it. Here I am, the middle-aged legacy producer, walking into this world of creators and the infrastructure that supports them. My guard was up because I expected the very kind of caste system I had fought so hard to climb, but now starting as a newbie.

I had my creator businesses going and ideas about opportunities I wanted to pursue. But I didn’t have the experience or recognition in this world that would give me a leg up.

Instead, I found a world that was highly accessible. The speakers from one event would be sitting in the next. Everyone was open to chat. I quickly made inroads to financiers, managers and heads of platforms. Follow-up emails were answered. Meetings were set. Business came out of those encounters. If you brought value or ideas to the table, they were worth exploring.

There are enormous egos in the creator economy too. I’ve met a few. And I’m aware that being welcomed into a room can color your judgment of everyone in it. But I’ve been thinking about whether there’s a business reason for the openness. So much is being figured out that people seem more willing to hear what someone else is working on.

I’ve had to make that adjustment myself. I’ve spent decades learning how to develop, produce and sell stories. I know what that experience is worth. But a creator who already writes, shoots, edits, distributes and markets their work may have very little use for the thing I walked in expecting to offer.

Calling them “talent” barely describes what they do. They’ve built businesses and relationships with audiences that I need to understand before I can be useful. I might see a way to help shape a story or develop something longer. They might have an entirely different ambition.

That takes some getting used to when you’ve spent years being paid for your judgment. You’re accustomed to having an answer. I’m finding myself asking more questions.

The willingness to reconsider seems especially useful in a business where you can put something out, see what happens and build from there. A short can become a series. Something that doesn’t connect can remain a one-off. You haven’t necessarily spent years getting it approved before finding out whether anyone wants it.

But you still have to accept what you’re seeing. I know how easy it is to decide that the audience didn’t understand something. Sometimes that may even be true. Creative work requires conviction, and I wouldn’t want to make everything by polling the audience. I do think there’s a problem when your first instinct is always to explain why your judgment was right.

We also bring very specific ideas about quality from Hollywood. I’ve spent my career developing those judgments. They matter to me. But they don’t explain every kind of work that people care about, and they can make it easy to dismiss something before you’ve bothered to understand its appeal.

Eugenio’s audience existed long before Hollywood took an interest. He had spent years building that relationship. The box office finally made it legible to people who hadn’t been paying attention. Yet in those meetings, we were still somehow waiting for their approval.

I keep thinking about how much you can miss that way.

And now, as AI and technology transform everything again, I’m finding that people in legacy media and the creator economy are questioning the future in similar ways. That’s been the most interesting part of these conversations for me.

I came into the creator economy expecting to learn how this newer business worked. I’m doing that. But the people I’m learning from are also trying to figure out what happens to their own businesses next. Having built something successful on YouTube doesn’t mean you know what AI will do to it. Having produced successful films and television doesn’t answer that question either.

We’re coming at it with different experience, but we’re asking many of the same things. What will people want to watch? What will they pay for? How much of what we know how to do will still be valuable, and where do we need to start learning again?

I don’t think anyone has particularly satisfying answers yet. That gives us a reason to talk to each other. It also makes the insistence on establishing who matters more in the room seem like a strange use of everyone’s time.

I spend at least one day a week at the Lighthouse in Venice, surrounded by people in the creator economy. I want the energy, curiosity and openness I find there. I meet someone every week I end up exploring business opportunities with. And they’re curious about what we bring from legacy media too.

It’s hard to single out one conversation because it’s the repetition that has made an impression. I keep going back, and I keep finding people willing to spend time on an idea before they know whether anything will come of it. Some of those conversations turn into business. Others help me understand something I hadn’t understood before.

That’s what I mean by humility here. You can have built a substantial business and still be interested in how someone else does it. You can know your work has value without assuming that makes you the authority on theirs.

None of this is an abandonment of legacy. I’m still passionate about film and TV. I’m just less tolerant of the bullshit.

We had a good week with El Juicio. I want to keep making work like that, and I want to understand where else our experience could take us. Increasingly, that means spending time with people whose accomplishments I might not immediately recognize either.

I’d rather ask what they’re working on and stay for the answer.

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This week, we’re rounding up some news, including the explosive announcement from YouTube on Shorts Series. More on that soon as we propose a new framework for where things are headed.

But first….

In a lot of ways, I’ve been waiting almost 3 years for this news.

Yesterday, YouTube announced a lot of exciting changes to the platform, but one stood out to me. Looks like the world’s largest streamer is officially jumping into the Microseries game.

“The company unveiled Shorts series, enabling creators to structure their Shorts into seasons and episodes, a structure that suits living room viewing. The feature is also available to creators on mobile and web.”

At last, audiences will be able to view a collection of vertical shorts in an intended order.

This is truly a game changer.

The Microseries phenomenon can now expand and reach new audiences, and, along with the innovations happening over at TikTok with their microseries products, the ability to properly distribute, and increasingly monetize, microseries is becoming available to anyone.

Now all roads truly lead to the algorithm.

I believe whole new audiences will discover a love for this format. They’ll respond to new genres, stories, and tonalities, which will raise awareness, inspire more storytellers, who will reach more audiences—and we’ll begin to see the true potential of this format.

I was at a roundtable hosted by Hernan Lopez last night, and as always he brought together a fantastic group to talk about the future of verticals. When this new feature came up, you could feel it in the room: there was an understanding that something was shifting.

I’ve always said that the microseries phenomenon was driven in large part by audiences who wanted to experience movies at the speed of TikTok.

Well, count YouTube in now.

I have so many calls to make.

Let’s get to work.

1. YouTube formally builds episodic series into Shorts

YouTube announced Shorts Series, allowing creators to organize Shorts into seasons and episodes - a major infrastructure change for serialized vertical storytelling. It removes one of the biggest barriers to open-platform microdramas: audiences can finally follow episodes in their intended order.
The Hollywood Reporter — “YouTube Wants to Turbocharge Microdramas on the TV Screen”

2. MACRO + MANSA launch a vertical-series partnership

MACRO Television Studios and MANSA Studios will develop, finance, produce and co-own vertical series, a meaningful signal that established Hollywood players see vertical as an IP business rather than simply cheap content. It’s another step toward a premium vertical ecosystem sitting between Hollywood and the existing microdrama apps.
Variety — “Mansa Studios, Macro Television Studios to Produce Vertical Series”

3. China confronts an explosion of AI-generated microdramas

China says roughly 430,000 microdramas were released in the first eight months of 2026, with more than 90% using AI technology, prompting new labeling and likeness rules. Interestingly, regulators are simultaneously encouraging investment in live-action work — suggesting that as production becomes nearly infinite, quality and human differentiation may become more valuable.
China SCIO — “China strengthens oversight as AI fuels micro-drama boom”

4. Brands love microdramas - now they need to prove ROI

Digiday reports that brands are increasingly sold on audience demand for microdramas, but are struggling to measure what those views actually deliver. One striking exception: Bob’s Discount Furniture says its Till Decor Do Us Part generated 152M+ views and nearly $9M in attributable sales, showing what a measurable branded-microdrama model could look like.
Digiday — “Marketers have bought into microdramas — but a lack of ROI might make them irrelevant”

5. COL Group pushes microdramas deeper into Europe

COL Group International has partnered with MediaSpurs to expand microdramas in Poland through distribution, platform partnerships, branded entertainment and production, using the country as a gateway into Central and Eastern Europe. It’s another sign that the major Asian microdrama companies are evolving beyond app launches toward partnerships with existing media and advertising ecosystems.
Señal News — “COL Group taps MediaSpurs to drive microdrama growth in Poland”

That’s all for this week. Follow for more news!

Welcome to OG: Approved—where rule-breaking creators shape the future. Hand-picked by Open Gardens, they’re not following the playbook—they’re writing the next one.

Name: FantasyDocs

Instagram: 151K Followers

Youtube: 7.1K Subscribers

Tik Tok: 114K Followers

Who is FantasyDocs?

I don’t know about you, but this past Monday night was devastating for me as a Giants fan.

I care a lot about this team. I don’t occasionally turn on the New York Giants for a little fun. I’m a diehard, season-ticket-holding, tailgating, screaming, and quite possibly too passionate of a Giants fan.

So when Jaxson Dart went down on the opening drive, I did what every completely rational fan does in that situation. I immediately went online looking for someone to tell me how bad it was.

That’s when I found FantasyDocs, aka Dr. Nithin V Natwa.

Natwa is board-certified in family medicine and sports medicine and practices in Chicago. He completed his sports medicine fellowship through Michigan State and has also worked with athletes in esports.

He has been doing fantasy injury analysis for years. In 2019, he was already hosting the NatwaMD podcast, breaking down NFL injuries and talking through what they meant for fantasy owners.

That is useful because the team update rarely answers the question the fan is actually asking. “Week to week” does not tell me whether I should hold a player, trade him, draft his backup, or prepare for six miserable Sundays.

Natwa gets into the recovery timeline, previous injuries, how performance could be affected, and how much uncertainty still remains. He is also careful about the fact that watching a replay is not the same thing as examining the player.

FantasyDocs is now a full fantasy-football injury product. The site tracks hundreds of players with injury histories, risk grades and projected availability, alongside tools for trades, waivers, dynasty leagues and drafts. There is an app with alerts, an “Ask the Doc” feature, paid subscriptions, and data licensing.

Natwa found a narrow audience with a recurring problem, earned its trust by answering that problem consistently, then built products around what those people kept needing. The same person who finds him because a quarterback goes down on Sunday can end up using FantasyDocs before a draft, checking an injury grade during the week, or paying for access to the larger database.

I found FantasyDocs because my quarterback got hurt and I wanted an answer immediately. Natwa has built an entire company around the fact that millions of fantasy players have some version of that same panic every week.

Three Things We Love About FantasyDocs

The expertise is real: Natwa trained and practiced in sports medicine before building the fantasy audience. He is bringing an actual medical background into sports content, not learning enough terminology to sound convincing.

He found a very specific problem to own: Fantasy players do not just want an injury diagnosis. They want to know what happens next and what they should do about it. FantasyDocs stays focused on that question.

The audience became a business: The social accounts led to subscriptions, an app, alerts, player databases, fantasy tools, and data licensing. Natwa did not need to leave the niche to grow. He kept building deeper into it.

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