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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As a legacy producer of film and television, I sometimes find the constant drumbeat that content must become more interactive or participatory to reach younger audiences a little daunting.

We were trained to believe that if you created a water-cooler moment—if everyone showed up Monday morning to the office talking about your movie or show—you had achieved all the participation you needed.

But alas: evolve or die.

A few weeks ago, a colleague called to ask whether I would explore a new movie technology that is interactive in the most literal sense. A theatrical movie driven by audience voting. I was hesitant. He persisted.

“This one is different,” he told me. “The tech is amazing.”

Then he mentioned the proof: an animated movie in Japan that had broken box office records on a remarkably small number of screens.

When Hypnosis Mic: Division Rap Battle opened in Japan on February 21, 2025, audiences used their phones to vote on the winners of the film’s rap battles. Each vote changed the version playing for everyone in the theater. Kino Industries president Scott C. Silver told me the movie went on to earn nearly ¥3 billion ($19 million US) after opening on roughly eighty-five screens.

That got my attention. So I agreed to a demonstration.

Seeing CtrlMovie in action clarified what my colleague had been trying to tell me. Kino had not removed the filmmaker or handed the story over to the crowd. It had created a tightly controlled form of collective choice—one that could change the movie without stopping it.

“Interactive entertainment” is often presented as a broad demand from younger audiences, even though the term covers very different experiences. A fan decoding clues, a player building a Fortnite island and a theater voting on the next scene are all participating.

They do not have the same power over the work.

How We Got Here

I can see a few reasons why participating in entertainment has become so familiar.

Video games, obviously. There are plenty of arguments about when games and storytelling really came together, but Final Fantasy VII feels like a hinge point: PlayStation’s 3D graphics and the storage capacity of CDs made room for elaborate cinematic sequences and a world you could spend dozens of hours inside.

Then social media made commenting, voting and telling creators what to do next practically a full-time occupation.

And the tools for making things reached far more people: you could edit a video, remix a scene or build a world using the device already in your pocket. of this fed an appetite to get inside the entertainment we love—to influence it, play with it and make something of our own from it.

I’ve been creating things since I was a kid, starting with animated flip pages, then clunky video cameras in college, and eventually screenwriting and producing. But when I watch a movie, my instinct is still to surrender to it. I want someone else to take me somewhere. My habits were already pretty well formed by the time story-driven gaming and social media took hold. Younger audiences grew up with participation as part of the deal. Worth remembering before I mistake my preferences for what a moviegoing experience should be.

Five Forms of Participation

CtrlMovie sent me down a rabbit hole. We call almost anything “interactive” now. But what does that mean? I realized they kind of fell into five broad categories.

Clue Hunting: The audience searches for answers without changing the story itself.

After Gravity Falls ended, creator Alex Hirsch organized Cipher Hunt, an international trail of clues that led fans to a real-world statue of the show’s villain. Severance inspired a less formal version of the same behavior. Between episodes, viewers gathered on Reddit, TikTok and other platforms to compare evidence, test theories and argue over what it all meant. The story stayed fixed. The audience kept digging.

Fan Remixing: Fans take a story they love and turn it into something new.

During the 2020 lockdown, TikTok users began posting songs, choreography, costumes and designs for an imaginary Ratatouille musical. No one had assigned them roles or coordinated the production. They simply kept adding pieces until producers assembled their work into a streamed benefit performance. E. L. James followed a more individual path: Fifty Shades of Grey began as Twilight fan fiction before she changed the characters’ names and published it as an original novel. In both cases, the original story became raw material for another one.

Crowd Control: An audience acts together to influence what gets made or how it is shaped.

By now we all know this one but it’s the clearest example: Youtuber Markiplier treated his community less like customers than partners in the life of his self-financed horror film, Iron Lung. He bypassed the traditional studio system, built anticipation and participation in the building of the movie through his own channels and asked fans to contact theaters that had not booked the movie.

World Weaving: Players use a platform’s tools to build much of the entertainment themselves.

Roblox lets users create and distribute their own games. Fortnite Creative gives players the tools to design custom islands and experiences. Minecraft is a sandbox for constructing and sharing entire worlds. In each case, the company built the framework—the tools, rules and distribution system—while players fill it with things to do. The platform provided the loom. The audience weaves.

Plot Power: The audience gets a say in the story before the story is finished.

The scripted science-fiction series Artificial was produced on Twitch and went for four seasons. The show followed Sophie, an artificial intelligence learning how to become human. During live broadcasts, viewers answered polls, questioned characters and helped make decisions that the writers carried into later episodes. Their choices did not always alter the story on the spot. But they entered the writing process while the season was still taking shape.

For creators / filmmakers and execs / studios alike, some of these opportunities can be designed into a project. Others depend on audiences taking the initiative. You can plant clues, invite votes or provide tools to build with. But you can’t plan on fans turning your movie into a musical. The producers of the Ratatouille performance recognized something that was already happening and found a way to bring it together.

So it’s understandable why a movie that requires participation from its very inception would be appealing. Audience involvement becomes part of the creative premise, something filmmakers can write for and build around.

Kino’s CtrlMovie brings that into a single theatrical screening: the audience makes choices together, the majority wins and the movie changes in front of them. Participation has a defined place in the work from the beginning.

Why Earlier Interactive Movies Stalled

Kino isn’t the first company to hand the audience the controls. A couple of earlier attempts were ahead of their time, though for very different reasons.

At Expo 67 in Montreal, Kinoautomat let audiences vote with red and green buttons on how a hapless man should navigate an increasingly disastrous day—including whether to let a neighbor wearing only a towel into his apartment before his wife got home. The film’s star appeared live to referee the decisions. It was a hit, but required a specially equipped theater and a live performer. And whatever the audience chose, the building caught fire. You could vote your way into trouble, but not out of it.

Then came Mr. Payback in 1995. Forty-four North American theaters installed three-button controls so audiences could vote roughly every 90 seconds on how a cyborg should punish rude and selfish people. Bob Gale wrote and directed it. The audience’s job was essentially to decide how sadistic the cyborg should get. Who said fascism can’t make for great comedy?

It bombed. (but I kinda wanna see it.)

Technology was clearly a factor in both cases. But my hunch is that even if these experiences could have scaled, the demand wouldn’t have been there. It took the evolution of story-driven gaming and social media to get audiences used to having a hand in their entertainment.

The Birth of Kino

Tobias Weber trained at the London Film School and worked as a commercial director before developing CtrlMovie. The idea joined his filmmaking background with an early interest in Dungeons and Dragons and story-driven games such as Monkey Island.

Weber’s first proof of concept played on an iPad, later reached consoles and appeared at roughly 50 film festivals. Its defining idea was already in place: a timed decision could change the story without stopping playback. When Fox invited Weber to present the technology, a conversation about the studio’s Choose Your Own Adventure rights opened a route into Hollywood.

“I wanted to build a narrative that allows an audience to find their own point of view in a matter,” Weber told me.

Weber met producers Chady Eli Mattar and Scott C. Silver in Los Angeles in 2017. Mattar and Silver had attended the AFI Conservatory and founded Silvatar Media which was producing genre movies. They supplied the production, financing and studio relationships needed to turn Weber’s invention into a company.

Weber focused on the system and interactive story design, Silver on production and finance, and Mattar on studio and exhibitor partnerships. Together they formed Kino Industries around the Swiss CtrlMovie operation.

Building a System Theaters Could Use

The first full proving ground was Late Shift, an interactive heist thriller made for about $1.5 million with outside investors. It demonstrated that a feature could move through authored branches without visible pauses, won a BAFTA Cymru award and reached console, PC and mobile platforms. It also showed the limits of a successful demonstration. The technology still had to fit the equipment, schedules and economics of commercial theaters.

Kino continued developing the platform as it pursued studio and exhibition partners. The company raised additional funding shortly before the pandemic, then built a streaming version when theaters shut down as they continued to focus on the theatrical experience. As cinemas reopened, Kino returned its attention to fixed theatrical installations and now has multiple movies in the pipeline for release.

Silver described the practical case for leaving the equipment in place: “Look, the machine is not all that expensive to begin with, so install it, leave it.”

The engineering problem was the branch itself. Earlier systems often exposed a pause while an optical drive searched for a new segment or a stream buffered.

Weber’s patented approach separates the audio and video streams. At a decision point, the system can move to a different video segment while continuous sound masks the transition. If the vote fails, ties or attracts no response, a default path keeps the movie running.

The audience sees only a phone interface. The screen stays black during the film, then lights for four or five seconds when a choice appears. A server collects the votes and sends the winning path to the playback system. The theater does not pause, and people who choose not to vote can keep watching.

You can also see the filmmakers behind the technology in the tools they’ve built. There’s a screenwriting program—think Final Draft with alternate paths—that lets writers build choices into the script, and an editing system that lets editors work with those branches. They’ve thought about how you write and cut one of these movies, as well as how you play it. As a producer, that part matters to me.

Less Choice and Better Constraints

Kino stands by the philosophy MAYA – “most advanced yet acceptable.” Currently viewers get a fixed set of options and a short voting window.

The company also favors stories in which a collective decision already belongs to the premise. A rap battle or survival scenario gives a crowd a legible question with an immediate consequence. An open-ended moral decision inside a conventional drama is harder to resolve by majority vote without weakening the character or the story.

The consequences can also arrive much later. Demonstrating the software, Silver pointed to a choice involving a knife: “This knife could come back at the end of the movie two hours later, and since you made that choice, you don’t have your knife. Then you know you’re out of luck.”

The system also makes the room part of the experience. After a CtrlMovie screening, viewers can receive a record of their choices, including how often the rest of the audience agreed with them and how often they were overruled. Weber described the feeling of being outvoted: “Sometimes you’re sitting in an audience, and they’re going against you all the time, and you go like, ‘Who are you, people?’”

Weber argues that this does not require abandoning a filmmaker’s point of view. As he put it, “we tell one story, or we tell it in variations. But there is one story, there is definitely one theme, and there is one message.” The audience gains agency inside an authored structure rather than becoming responsible for inventing the structure itself.

Testing their Premise

This is where Hypnosis Mic comes in.

King Records, a Japanese music and entertainment company, had already begun developing an interactive film when it approached Kino. The film was based on Hypnosis Mic: Division Rap Battle, King Records’ multimedia franchise about six teams of voice-acted characters who face off in rap battles.

The project began with music in 2017 and developed an unusually direct relationship with fans, who had already helped determine the winners of earlier battles.

Silver said the production team had already mapped the film’s voting points, branching paths and possible endings, although the final animation was still being completed. Kino’s job was to turn that structure into something theaters could reliably run.

Kino integrated the film with its software and worked on the rollout with Toho, one of Japan’s largest film companies and the operator of the nationwide TOHO Cinemas chain. Toho served as both distributor and exhibitor, helping equip theaters across Japan. The release extended beyond its own circuit and eventually reached roughly 85 screens. Installation moved forward while King Records finished the animation, and the film opened on February 21, 2025.

Silver said a Toho executive had hoped the film might reach 500 million yen at the box office. By the time of the interview, it had earned nearly 3 billion yen. That result came from a relatively small theatrical footprint, although the film also had two significant advantages: an established fan base and a premise naturally built around choosing winners.

As reported by The Wrap, fifty-one percent of the “Hypnosis Mic” audience returned for repeat viewings, encouraged by an app that allowed fans to see if their favorite group was winning in screenings across all theaters showing the film.

And it’s still going. In a follow-up, Silver told me Hypnosis Mic was still getting one or two screenings a day in Japan. A recent week-long re-release packed theaters again, he says, while its Taiwan run was extended three times. King Records is also closing deals in Korea, the Middle East and Latin America. For a movie built around choosing what happens next, people apparently keep coming back to choose again.

The release also changed what Kino built around the film. Silver said the company had added “more collectibles, more achievements, a leaderboard system” to its app—rewards that extended participation beyond the vote itself.

Hypnosis Mic offers a specific lesson rather than a universal formula. CtrlMovie made the voting quick and unobtrusive, while the rap battles gave audiences a clear reason to vote.

The film remained authored, but each theater could produce a different shared version of it. Interactivity was not an interruption added to the movie. It was the event audiences had come to see.

Where it Goes from Here

The next test is already in post.

Silver says Kino has two films at that stage: Slay Day, a throwback slasher in which every main character can live or die, in any combination, and Control Your Fear, a working title for a ghost-hunting experience filmed at a location he describes as one of the most haunted in the US.

Deciding who survives a slasher seems like a pretty natural use of the format.

The announced slate also includes Alice Is Missing, based on the role-playing game, the stalker thriller Girl Crazy, and the haunted-house film Nightmare Manor. Horror is clearly getting the first crack at this. I’m curious about what else filmmakers might do with it.

Technology creates new ways to tell stories, but sometimes a storyteller has to push it along. Tobias wanted to tell stories in a way that required different tools.

My first instinct remains: filmmakers should tell the stories they want to tell. I like being in the hands of someone with a point of view. But why do I assume giving audiences choices means surrendering that point of view? The filmmaker still decides what we can choose, what we know when we choose it, and what happens next. That’s authorship, too. Gaming may have already settled this. I’m not a gamer.

Sure, this could become a roller coaster with the audience voting for the next drop. That could be fun.

But I’m more curious about sitting with strangers at a moral fork in the road and having to decide together. What happens when the room makes a choice we find appalling—and we have to sit through the consequences? The right filmmaker could reveal something about us that’s hard to get at any other way.

For creators whose work grows out of a relationship with their communities, participation could bring that relationship inside the movie. I’d be curious to see what Kinigra Deon or Alan Chikin Chow would do with it. Or filmmakers like Curry Barker and Kane Parsons, who came up making things for online audiences. What happens when those audiences get a say in the story?

And how might those choices change across cultures, genders, ages or political affiliations? Would the same moral dilemma send different rooms down entirely different paths?

Imagine a theatrical run generating three or four versions of a movie based on audience decisions. A distributor sells them all to Netflix. Would you want the version that reflects your instincts—or the one shaped by people who see the world differently?

Silly, perhaps. But fun to think about. For me, the exercise is to stay open. We don’t have to pursue every new way of telling a story. But this one might earn a place in theaters, bringing a different audience out for a different kind of night at the movies.

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FRESH CLIPPINGS

Openness as Strategy

We covered Wesley Wang launching his production company a while back. Well, this week he announced their first project:

A YouTube competition series where one creator wins $100,000 to make a movie. Wang is funding the prize and production costs through the studio’s angel investors, and applications are open now. Creators can submit a one-minute pitch on TikTok or Instagram, of which ten finalists will get flown to New York where the audience votes on the winner.

Wang’s own path through the traditional studio system shaped the idea. He has openly described running into creative friction and bureaucratic inefficiency there, not because of any one person’s fault, but as a byproduct of it simply being a large system. This competition is his attempt to give other young filmmakers a different way in.

The competition is of course interesting, but the mindset behind it matters more. It represents a kind of openness that has never really existed in legacy media, which has always been a closed system by design.

Franklin Leonard makes the analogy all the time about why he started The Black List. He says: imagine someone told you that if you want to play basketball in the NBA, you should move to Los Angeles and play pickup basketball next to the Staples Center. If you're really good, someone will see you and put you on the team.

Sounds crazy, right? Yet that’s how Hollywood has operated for decades.

Legacy studios could take a page from Wesley. Dedicating even a small portion of their annual budgets to fund new movies from new creators is a great way to find what might otherwise never surface.

A24’s Next Creator Bet

A24 is teaming with Spooky Pictures and Image Nation Studios to bring the SCP Foundation, one of the largest fan-built horror and science-fiction universes on the internet, to theaters for the first time. The project is an untitled extension of the V/H/S found-footage franchise, with worldwide rights secured and a 2027 theatrical target.

SCP started the same way Backrooms did, as a creepypasta posted to 4chan in 2008. What began as a single short story evolved into a sprawling, collaborative mythology built by thousands of contributors, involving a secret organization protecting humanity from anomalous entities. Along the way it spawned games, short films, and web series, all built by fans with no studio involvement and largely no financial return for the people doing the building.

Internet lore has become a source of new stories for horror precisely because of the rabid built-in audiences they carry. The plan, it seems, is to keep tapping into the most compelling of them.

It’s worth noting that SCP has always operated under a Creative Commons license that requires derivative works to carry the same open terms. That detail has not been addressed in this announcement, and it remains one of the more interesting unresolved questions in the entire internet horror gold rush. A community built collaboratively under an open license is now being adapted by one of the most brand-protective distributors in the business. Just recently, I wrote about A24 getting in trouble for going after Backrooms creators for making inspired artwork.

We’ll see what happens this time.

Netflix's Is Reshaping its Catalog

Per Ampere Analysis, Netflix’s short-form offering in the US grew from 8% to 13% of its total TV catalog in just three months following the rollout of publisher content from Condé Nast, BuzzFeed, and Hearst. Roughly 300 short-form seasons and more than 1,200 hours of content have been added to a catalog that has historically been dominated by traditional 21-to-60-minute episodes. This type of change confirms that the platform’s short-form push is more than just an experiment.

Meanwhile, Netflix signed another major YouTube star. Drew Binsky, the travel creator with 7.3 million YouTube subscribers and 22 million followers across platforms, is bringing a curated collection of his travelogues to Netflix, with new episodes going forward releasing day-and-date on Netflix alongside YouTube.

Now that Netflix is combining publisher-produced short-form programming with individually signed creator talent, are they just YouTube? And is that even the right strategy? Short-form could attract new viewers in the short term, but as Matt Belloni and others have argued, fighting YouTube at its own game is a losing bet. Differentiating through premium content might serve it far better in the long run.

This also ties back to the exclusivity conversation from last week. Binsky’s day-and-date arrangement means the content is no longer YouTube’s exclusively, and his 200 million monthly views represent exactly the kind of built-in audience Netflix wants living inside its own ecosystem rather than sitting entirely on someone else’s platform.

GARDEN VIEW

HARVEST QUOTE

"12 years ago, creator / fan events stood alone. A roomful of youtubers was enough to entice people to attend. But today that’s different. The most successful events seem to be “Creators Plus” or “Plus Creators”"

— Media Strategist (and so much more) Jim Louderback

Have a great weekend…

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This week, microdramas become a language-learning tool, Lime Pictures brings its soap instincts into vertical, Shorts builds a new production lane, and Content London gives the format a bigger seat at the table. Then, we head to Fast Company Innovation Festival, where Scott joined Michael Sugar and Yasmin Dastmalchi to talk about what happens when brands stop advertising around entertainment and start making it themselves.

But first…

Nothing endures but change.

The folding iPhone feels significant to me.

I’ll admit it: I’m a big fan of Apple. Their ability to blend design, form, function, and execution at an extraordinarily high level has always impressed me.

There are plenty of fair criticisms of them. They’re often not the first to do something. But they have a remarkable history of being the ones who make something feel fully realized for the first time.

And I look at this folding phone as a metaphor for the moment we’re in.

The stories we watch and the ideas we receive are being given to us in an ever-evolving shape; one that slots into the different patterns, screens, and moments of our lives.

Horizontal. Vertical. Square. Whatever comes next.

They’re all possible now.

History really does love to rhyme. And when I look at a folding Apple phone, I see the future continuing to take shape, quite literally.

But I also see a future where our need for authentic, original storytelling becomes more important than ever.

There is so much happening in AI, technology, and the industries that increasingly pervade our lives. And it seems to me that one of the most important things we can do is hold on to our humanity and seek, develop, and collaboratively invent new ways to witness it, recognize it, and remind each other of its importance.

Lately, it feels like the future is happening faster than ever. Because, in many ways, it is. The rate of change keeps accelerating.

I don’t know that it can be stopped. And maybe stopping it isn’t the point. At the end of the day, we are still at the helm. I don’t fear having the wheel ripped from us. I fear we surrender and never get it back.

Through every new shape our technology takes, evolving endlessly towards the thing it has always been, the constant we must never surrender is our humanity.

Nothing endures but change. But our imperfections aren’t bugs waiting to be fixed. They’re part of what makes us human. And our humanity is the thing worth carrying into whatever comes next.

Alright, let’s get into it.

Microdramas Are Becoming a Language-Learning Tool

COL Group and Lingopie have launched DramaRizz, a language-learning app built around one-minute vertical dramas, complete with dual-language subtitles, tap-to-translate features and scene-based flashcards. The companies are also co-producing 10 original microdramas. It’s a new use case for the format itself: the same short episodes, recurring characters and cliffhangers designed to keep viewers watching are now being used to keep them learning.

Hollyoaks Producer Lime Pictures Goes Vertical

Lime Pictures has released its first vertical drama, Revenge Is a Dish, on RoseBerry Media’s EPIS. More interesting than another legacy producer entering the space is where Lime sees the overlap: co-head of scripted Angelo Abela specifically pointed to pacey storytelling, big hooks and the ability to shoot high volumes of high-drama scenes as skills vertical shares with soaps (something we’ve talked about at length in this previous bloom). As legacy and vertical converge, some of the most transferable expertise may already exist in the corners of television built for speed and serialization.

Shorts Builds a New Production Lane

Vertical streamer Shorts has teamed with Full Moon Artists Productions on Love in the Hamptons, which is set to begin filming later this month as part of a new FMAxShorts-branded strand. This dedicated strand of content is looking like a pipeline, with a platform and producer creating a repeatable lane for original verticals rather than approaching each show as a one-off experiment.

Vertical Gets a Bigger Seat at Content London

Executives from ARTE France, Play Media and ZDF are joining Content London’s third Vertical Programming & Microdrama Summit, where they’ll discuss investment, business models and how broadcasters are responding to mobile viewing. This isn’t a new commission, but the room matters. Vertical is increasingly becoming part of the conversation inside the same international TV-market infrastructure where the rest of the industry buys, sells and strategizes around programming.

When Brands Stop Advertising and Start Making Entertainment

WATCH: From Ads to Entertainment: Why Brands Are Becoming Storytellers at Fast Company Innovation Festival. Watch the full panel here.

We talk a lot in The Vertical Bloom about convergence. Hollywood is learning from digital. Digital is borrowing from Hollywood. And increasingly, brands are finding themselves somewhere in the middle.

This week, we got to watch that convergence happen in real time.

Scott Brown joined Michael Sugar, the Academy Award-winning producer behind Spotlight and founder and CEO of Sugar23, and Yasmin Dastmalchi, President of Maybelline New York and Essie USA, onstage at the Fast Company Innovation Festival for a conversation about what happens when brands stop simply advertising around entertainment and start making it themselves.

The conversation was moderated by Grace Snelling, Staff Reporter at Fast Company, who did a fantastic job bringing three unique perspectives into the same conversation.

Michael comes from Hollywood. Yasmin sits inside one of the biggest consumer brands in the world. Scott came up through YouTube and digital before finding his way into scripted vertical.

Three different roads, one increasingly shared conversation.

A few weeks ago, we wrote about this exact challenge in The Vertical Bloom: how legacy entertainment and the creator economy can stop trying to slot one another into their existing machines and instead figure out what each side actually brings to the table.

This panel felt like that idea in practice.

Here are the top-level takeaways I’m still thinking about:

1. “I Don’t Want an Ad.”

Yasmin described one of the biggest changes in how she approaches entertainment partners very simply: she starts by telling them she doesn’t want a traditional 30-second ad campaign.

That changes the conversation immediately.

Instead of beginning with an advertising format and figuring out how to fill it, you can begin with the audience and ask what they might actually choose to watch. Maybe that’s a creator collaboration. Maybe it’s a rom-com. Maybe it’s a microdrama.

The opportunity isn’t just putting brands into new formats. It’s letting the format drive the ideas.

2. Get the Brand and the Storyteller in the Same Room Early

Michael described the traditional advertising process as layers of intermediaries: media buyers talking to ad sales teams, agencies translating briefs, creators often arriving farther downstream.

The problem is that information gets lost.

His example was DoorDash. A writer might hear “food delivery company” and build a story around ordering dinner. But DoorDash may understand its brand much more broadly.

If the storyteller gets access to that thinking earlier, we can shift from a transactional relationship to a collaborative one, which will yield much more fruitful results.

3. Collaboration Works Better When Everyone Knows What They Know

This was one of my favorite parts of the conversation.

Yasmin talked about something she has had to unlearn: the instinct to be the expert on every part of the process.

She knows her brand. She knows its values, its products and its consumer. But when she enters a room with creators and storytellers, she also has to trust that they are experts in their own right.

That sounded very familiar.

In our recent piece about the convergence of legacy and the creator economy, we made essentially the same argument from the other direction. If you bring digital-native people into the room because they have built an audience or mastered a medium, you have to give them enough room to actually apply that expertise.

Equally, they need to trust that the Brand is not only the authority on, but also the expert of the Brand’s values, voice, and target audience.

Collaboration doesn’t require everyone to know everything.

It requires everyone to know what they bring to the table, and to be curious about what others bring.

4. Brands Are Storytellers Too

Scott made the point onstage that brands already have many of the building blocks of storytelling.

They have a voice. They have values. They understand their audience.

Our job as creative people is not necessarily to bolt a product onto a story after the fact. It should be to help translate those existing qualities into entertainment.

When everyone involved is genuinely excited about the thing being made, rather than one side making the content and the other approving it, the work usually gets better.

5. The Format Is Changing Because of Audience Demand

Scott described microdramas onstage as, fundamentally, a movie on TikTok.

Not because a microdrama literally needs to live on TikTok, but because the audience behavior that TikTok helped normalize changed the grammar of entertainment.

A traditional feature can spend several minutes setting the table. A microdrama usually has to tell you almost immediately what its promise is and why you should keep watching.

We think storytelling itself IS a technology. The tools, formats and grammar evolve, in reaction to audiences evolving, in real time.

Digital is growing up.

And maybe this is what convergence actually looks like. Not Hollywood becoming digital or digital becoming Hollywood.

It’s all of us getting a little more fluent in one another’s languages, then building something none of our individual systems would have made on their own.

Thanks again to Michael, Yasmin and Grace for such a thoughtful conversation, and to Fast Company for giving us the opportunity to have it.

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: Paid Vacation Comedy

Instagram: 288K Followers

Youtube: 85K Subscribers

What Is Paid Vacation Comedy?

Paid Vacation Comedy brings together stand-up Zac Townsend and Ali Shahriari, the writer/director behind years of viral sketch work with Zebra Corner.

Paid Vacation combines their two instincts. The account moves through fake commercials, workplace sketches, news, social satire, and recurring characters without depending on one performer or one format. The videos are written for the camera from the beginning rather than feeling like stand-up premises that happened to get filmed.

The parodies have also started reaching the people on the other side of the joke. Their Waffle House training video traveled well beyond the page, while a Kill Tony parody made its way to Tony Hinchcliffe and the show before Townsend eventually appeared there himself.

More recently, Paid Vacation has started giving some of those ideas more room.

COOKED is their new scripted restaurant comedy built around line cooks and the particular insanity of working in a kitchen. Instead of starting over with a new world every time they post, Townsend and Shahriari now have a workplace and characters they can keep returning to.

They are trying something completely different with My Pants, Your Pants. Paid Vacation asked followers to send in stories about the last time they pooped their pants and received more than 10,000 submissions. Townsend and producer Taylor Brown turned those voicemails into a podcast.

That response says quite a bit about the community they have built. Ten thousand people were willing to call a hotline and voluntarily tell Paid Vacation one of the more humiliating stories of their lives.

There is also a Patreon, merchandise, and live work around the account. Paid Vacation began with short sketches and parodies. Now one idea becomes a scripted series, another becomes a podcast, and the audience is starting to become part of what gets made.

Three Things We Love About Paid Vacation Comedy

They know the format they are parodying: The Waffle House training video, commercial spoofs, fake news, and Kill Tony game all work because Paid Vacation understands the thing well enough to reproduce its language before breaking it.

The two creators bring different skills: Townsend comes from stand-up and joke writing. Shahriari spent years making web sketches with Zebra Corner. Paid Vacation gets both the premise and the visual execution.

They are giving the sketches somewhere to grow: COOKED creates a recurring workplace, while My Pants, Your Pants turned an audience prompt into its own show. The page is starting to produce formats that can live longer than one upload.

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Hollywood is in the middle of an overcorrection.

As the industry chases the creator economy—and wonders whether it has been doing everything wrong—a new generation of producers is arriving for whom the internet is neither a threat nor a strategy. It is simply another tool in the box.

Lucas Ford is one of them.

Yeah, he’s the guy who discovered The Backrooms and Kane Parsons. (For the feature, they dropped “The”—channeling Timberlake-cum-Sean Parker.)

In August, my friends at Lighthouse suggested we host a series of Open Gardens conversations about this great convergence, building on the success of the Horror Triumvirate.

We began with Akshay Mehta, head of Lighthouse Studios, and a fascinating discussion about his work with Lyrical Lemonade. Then we brought Open Gardens to Lighthouse for a conversation with Lucas.

I knew the headline version of his story. While working at 21 Laps, Lucas found Kane Parsons’s short, brought Kane and the project to his bosses, and helped set in motion the development deal that followed.

Leading up to the movies’ release, press and interviews referred to him only as “the assistant” who had found it—until Matt Belloni finally put his name to the story in Puck.

Before my pre-interview with Lucas, Belloni’s account was all I had read. It was gratifying to see Lucas receive credit, but I was more interested in what came next.

I had him pegged as a terminally online kid who had stumbled onto something huge—probably someone who preferred YouTube to movies and would eventually leave Hollywood to work with creators or start some new-media business.

In short order, our conversation made it obvious that I had him wrong.

Lucas is thoughtful, curious, ambitious, and deeply driven—although in that polite, low-key Canadian way that can make ambition easy to miss.

He grew up making things online and learned early to pay attention to an audience. The internet became a natural place to find emerging talent, ideas, and cultural currents. Then he worked at TIFF, encountered world-class filmmakers, and became a cinephile.

That is what makes Lucas interesting. He isn’t “the internet guy.” He is a producer looking everywhere—online, in cinemas, at festivals, and in conversations—for filmmakers and stories that move him.

He left 21 Laps before The Backrooms was made or his role in it was widely recognized, then began building projects of his own.

At 32, one of his first films as a producer, Portal to Hell, had just been released. He now has a dozen movies between development and post-production, six of them financed. There’s Adulting, about a recent grad student who falls in love with his mom’s friend; Henry’s Ebb, an emotionally grounded film with genre elements about a boy and his imaginary friend; a stop-motion movie made by two young artists in their Silver Lake home; and a prehistoric love story.

None of this happened because he was “the guy who found The Backrooms.” It happened because Lucas is not a fluke.

Sitting with him reminded me why producing can be so much fun.

His approach recalls producers like Christine Vachon and , but it is powered by a distinctly contemporary fluency: Lucas understands the convergence of filmmaking, online culture, and audience. He is humble, but seasoned producers should listen closely. There is much to learn from how he is evolving the role.

He will be a leading voice of this generation. You heard it here first.

Taste Before Metrics

The easiest lesson for Hollywood to take from The Backrooms story is that Lucas found a popular YouTube video before everyone else. But Lucas does not begin with popularity. He begins with his own response to the work.

The same principle has shaped every great producer since Irving Thalberg became the Boy Wonder at MGM in 1924. And that’s how Lucas looks at creators more broadly.

A large audience will get his attention. It will not make the decision for him.

Sometimes the work that excites him has almost no audience at all.

Lucas understands the signals coming from the internet, but he does not confuse those signals with taste. We all need to heed that warning.

Looking Everywhere

No one at 21 Laps formally appointed him the company’s internet scout. He simply went where no one was looking—and where he naturally explores anyway.

The habit was more important than any particular platform.

One project began with a piece of album artwork.

Elsewhere in the conversation, he talked about finding filmmakers through Instagram, Fantastic Fest, video-game cutscenes, and work coming out of New Zealand, Scotland, Serbia, and the UK.

We all know that a cinematic voice doesn’t need to come from Sundance. But it could. His internet fluency just means he casts a bigger net.

Community as Creative Intelligence

When Lucas stumbled onto The Backrooms, Kane Parsons’s video had around 50,000 views. Within a month, it had 11 million. Lucas noticed that growth, but he was equally interested in what the audience was saying.

The audience gave him another way to understand the work. It showed him which details people cared about, where their curiosity was leading them, and how deeply they wanted to participate in the world Kane had created.

Lucas is optimistic about younger audiences precisely because they are demanding.

Yeah, don’t we always do this? Question the younger audiences because we don’t understand them? They are all ADHD. Terminally online. Can’t watch a whole movie. The fear is generated from lack of proximity. Its not just reading data, its living in it. That’s why we need young producers making movies for their generations.

The participatory nature of an online community also creates a different kind of relationship with a story.

But Lucas stops short of letting audience data become a formula.

He understands an online community as a source of creative intelligence. It can tell him why people care. It cannot tell him what he should care about.

Trust your gut. In a world that demands curation, the producer-as-curator has never been more vital.

But it’s not new — Thalberg, David O. Selznick, Samuel Goldwyn, Val Lewton, Robert Evans, Bert Schneider and Bob Rafelson, Saul Zaentz, Kathleen Kennedy and Frank Marshall, Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer, Scott Rudin, Vachon, Hope, Dede Gardner and Jeremy Kleiner, Jason Blum.

All curators of their generations.

Protecting the Strange Edges

I’ve written about the success of the Horror Triumvirate. How it was as inevitable as it was a fluke to timing.

I asked Lucas about it. Like me he expects Hollywood’s current enthusiasm for creator-driven movies to produce failures.

Wise words from a young producer. Finding a creator is only the beginning. The harder job is bringing that creator into a larger system without losing what made the work distinctive.

Lucas applies the same test when developing an online work into a feature.

He sees the internet as another place to find filmmakers, not as a shortcut around the work of producing them.

If you really break down the success of ‘Iron Lung,’ ‘Obsession’ and ‘Backrooms’ only the first was a pure creator-driven movie. The other two depended on the Hollywood system, ‘Backrooms’ more than the others. Developed, packaged, financed and distributed by the Hollywood machine.

It’s an AND conversation: the old way and the new way, working together.

Building Around the Artist

A creator who can make something remarkable alone may not be ready to direct a large crew, develop a screenplay, or explain an idea in a studio meeting. Lucas sees helping them cross that gap as part of producing.

The process cannot be identical for every filmmaker.

Lucas described an animation project he is producing with two filmmakers who were accustomed to animating everything themselves.

The goal is not to turn every creator into a conventional studio director.

This may be the clearest expression of what makes Lucas valuable as a producer. He can translate between a creator’s highly individual process and the larger machinery required to finance and make the work. He does not assume the creator must change first.

Designing More Than One Path

Lucas is still primarily producing movies. But he does not assume that a feature released through a traditional distributor is the only possible destination for a project.

We talked about the excitement of a storyteller using more than one medium—not simply a ninety-minute movie—to express themselves. What’s exciting is considering how that talent can live across so many different formats.

For Lucas, a feature can be one expression of a creator’s work rather than the final rung on a ladder.

That flexibility is built directly into his stop-motion animation project. The team is producing it as 45 two-minute episodes that can also be assembled into a feature.

He’s building in a hedge for himself, the filmmakers, and the financiers—not merely as a matter of pragmatism, but to create leverage and preserve the best path forward.

Yet his ultimate investment is in the filmmakers, not a distribution hack.

Reaching the Audience Is Part of Producing

Lucas does not draw a hard line between making a film and finding its audience.

That means considering how the film will live beyond its running time.

For his horror comedy Portal to Hell, filmmaker / DP Woody Bess spent a day taking the film’s eight-foot demon (played by creature actor Trevor Newlin) around Los Angeles. Lucas, Woody and the film’s star and fellow producer Trey Holland have been building a DIY theatrical release plan across North America inspired by Hundred of Beavers (2022 silent self released silent movie) and Iron Lung.

Yes but he wasn’t just extending the confines of the movie. As I’ve written: To sell a product, you can’t mention the product. Pulling the scary creature out of the movie and sticking him in mundane settings, breaking the fourth wall of the movie. Simple. Smart and the right mindset for a producer today.

Lucas sees this as another part of understanding the audience.

The question is how the movie’s DNA can carry across different surfaces, with each expression standing on its own. That isn’t merely marketing.

I’ve been making this point for a while. Producers need to think differently about what storytelling and marketing mean and how they’ve become intertwined and evolved.

For Lucas, it’s just a natural part of producing.

Technology Serves Instinct

Lucas approaches AI with the same lack of ceremony. It can help him pre-visualize a film, build production systems, extend a physical world, or complete mechanical work more efficiently.

On one project, Lucas used a combination of physical production and AI tools in a proof-of-concept test whether a story that might traditionally require a $150 million budget could be made for $10 million.

But he has no interest in outsourcing the fundamental decision of whether an idea deserves to exist.

Amen, Lucas. Amen.

Repetition

Hollywood is searching for a creator-economy formula. Lucas is building a body of work. The internet changes where he looks, what he notices, how he works with filmmakers, and how he reaches an audience. The producer’s job remains the same: recognize something special, protect it, and find a way to get it made.

It’s an evolution, not a revolution.

None of this works if Lucas’s discovery of The Backrooms is treated as a lightning strike. His approach depends on doing the same work repeatedly: searching, watching, meeting people, developing projects, and placing bets that may lead nowhere.

When he left 21 Laps to produce full time, he did not begin by trying to reproduce the scale of The Backrooms.

That may be the most traditional thing about him.

The reality is Lucas will be judged not on being the assistant who found Backrooms, but on the movies and other media projects he makes, and how they fare in the marketplace. Right now he is operating on promise and potential. Producers are judged on a body of work over time. But to meet him is to root for him.

In him and his peers is the future of cinema.

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FRESH CLIPPINGS

A New Theatrical Pipeline

AMC Theatres announced the launch of Leawood Films last week, a new distribution label built specifically to bring more small and mid-sized movies into theaters. The company is targeting fully financed or already completed films, the kind that often play well at festivals and then struggle to find a real theatrical home. Variance will handle North American bookings, AMC will handle marketing, and Piece of Magic Entertainment will handle distribution overseas.

The logic behind this is simple. Movie theater chains need more movies. The theatrical business has recovered in fits and starts since the pandemic, but it remains dependent on a relatively small number of major releases to fill an enormous amount of screen capacity. AMC has thousands of screens and not always enough compelling films to put on them. And though they’re part of Fathom, a joint-venture with Regal and Cinemark, Leawood Films is a more direct response to that excess capacity for AMC specifically. The chain has been explicit that this is meant to complement its studio relationships rather than compete with them.

What makes this interesting, though, is the potential pipeline it could create for those outside of the Hollywood system, i.e. creators. AMC already has direct experience distributing outside the traditional studios, having worked with Taylor Swift on The Eras Tour and with Beyoncé on Renaissance. Those were massive theatrical successes built on the fandom of two major music stars. Leawood Films formalizes that infrastructure into something that’s repeatable. And critically, it is not exclusive to AMC. The label plans to work with rival theater circuits both domestically and internationally.

Thinking about everything happening in the creator-to-theatrical space right now, it will be very interesting to see how, or if, audiences built online will show up to theaters now that presumably more shots will be taken in the space.

Because what’s been missing for a lot of creators and independent filmmakers is not necessarily the audience, but the infrastructure to get from a finished film to actual screens.

It is early, and the first titles will not be announced until next year or even 2028. But if AMC executes this well, it can become a genuine path alongside traditional studio distribution and the self-distribution model.

That is a meaningful new door.

An Inside Look at YouTube’s Creator Deals

Natalie Jarvey got the scoop on how YouTube is paying creators millions of dollars just to keep them from leaving. As we know, the Netflix incursion into creators has only accelerated in recent months, and YouTube’s response has been quite the story since.

According to Jarvey’s reporting, the platform is currently making offers to roughly 15 creators, with deals ranging from the low seven figures up to around $10 million, all to keep their content exclusive to YouTube for a defined period. The offers reportedly come with both a carrot and a stick. Take content to a competing platform, particularly Netflix, and a creator risks losing their spot at Brandcast, YouTube’s advertising showcase, along with billboard promotion and access to the preferred advertising program reserved for top-tier creators.

One dealmaker described YouTube executives as “scared shitless”, which is a remarkable posture for a company that still dominates streaming by every meaningful metric. The fact that YouTube feels compelled to pay millions to retain talent it helped create in the first place says a lot about how leverage may be shifting.

Digital talent has never carried more power than it does right now, and YouTube writing eight-figure checks to keep people from leaving is the clearest evidence of that yet.

What Exclusivity Really Means

Speaking about exclusivity, Steve Raizes wrote a piece last month about the importance of being clear on what that truly means.

On August 13, Disney+ and The Overlap announced a one-year deal making Disney+ the headline sponsor of Stick to Football and a new show called Stick to United with Wayne Rooney. Both companies put out press releases the same day.

The releases did not describe the same deal.

Disney’s version says 20 of the 40 Stick to Football episodes are exclusive to Disney+ for a limited time, along with six commissioned specials, and stops there. It never says what happens to any of it afterward. Global, which holds a majority stake in The Overlap, says both the windowed episodes and the specials return to YouTube once the exclusive period ends. Global’s CEO said the same thing on LinkedIn.

Neither release states how long the exclusive window actually lasts. Neither confirms or denies the other’s account of what happens to the specials once that window closes. As Raizes points out, both versions can technically be true at the same time, because exclusivity can now mean at least four different things: here first, here only, here only for a while, or here only in certain territories. Each company simply picked the reading that serves its own audience. Disney is writing for someone deciding whether to subscribe. Global is writing for advertisers and for the YouTube audience that does not want to feel like it is being locked out.

The larger point is that if you are negotiating any kind of distribution or sponsorship deal in this environment, there is a real chance the other side is reading exclusive as “here only” while you are reading it as “here first,” and nobody has to be acting in bad faith for that gap to exist.

Raizes’s advice is practical: when exclusivity shows up in an agreement, make the document answer five specific questions.

How long?

In which territories?

For which specific episodes?

What happens the day it expires?

And who is responsible for making that happen?

As legacy platforms and creators increasingly share the same content, the old assumptions baked into contract language may not hold like they used to.

Windowing used to be a relatively simple concept. But it no longer is, and the Disney and Overlap situation is proof that even sophisticated companies with experienced legal teams are not immune to the ambiguity.

GARDEN VIEW

Is M. Night the first traditional director to become a creator? Excited to see where this channel goes…

HARVEST QUOTE

"Executives at creator economy companies face unique challenges. These businesses are built around a creator (or in some cases a group), who are personally and often inseparably tied to the businesses."

— Kaya Yurieff and Jasmine Enberg, discussing the recent exodus of executives at creator companies

Have a great weekend…

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This week, notes on how to make a good adaptation for microdrama, some highs and lows for branded microseries, and more Hollywood industry leaders joining the scripted vertical world.

But First-

I’ve been thinking about who gets to tell stories.
And who makes those stories possible.

Next week, I’ll be onstage at Fast Company in New York City with Academy Award winner Michael Sugar of Sugar23 and Yasmin Dastmalchi, President of Maybelline and Essie.

We’ll be talking about brands becoming storytellers.
Across film. Television. And vertical microdramas.

Personally, I’m curious.

How does an elevated storyteller like Michael look at this evolving space? What techniques does Yasmin—who leads two of the world’s most impactful brands—use to communicate a message through story?

And where does all of this go next?

I believe scripted digital storytelling is well on its way to delivering work that can stand alongside the shows we love. Work with real craft. Real impact. Work that might even say something about the world along the way.

Are we there yet?

Maybe not.

But it’s early.

And brands will almost certainly be important patrons of what comes next.

So what’s the balance? How do storytellers make something meaningful, brands communicate something true, and audiences come away feeling like their time was respected?

How do all sides win?

I’m excited to share my perspective.

And maybe more importantly, to listen.

Alright, let’s get into it-

The Hollywood Reporter adds Microdramas to their charts of streaming and TV ratings, box office grosses, and industry data.

Vertical Video Studio LoveHit Launches With Adaptations Of Literary Classics Starring Microdrama Regulars & Eric Roberts

LA-based microdrama app LoveHit is launching this month with five classic novel adaptations: Wuthering Heights, Pride and Prejudice, Jane Eyre, The Great Gatsby and Beauty and the Beast with more in post-production. The projects are being shot and edited as both vertical microseries and horizontal films. The latter of which will head to Cannes in the Fall for MIPCOM.

How Jamie Oliver’s midlife crisis became a Life360 microdrama

Celebrity chef Jamie Oliver partnered with family tracking app Life360 for a comedy microseries, Finding Jamie, that puts entertainment first. The Drum shares how director Tom Kingsley led the Baby Teeth project, treating it not as a commercial but a comedy built around Oliver and his family. Jamie Oliver Group reports that this collaboration was the perfect opportunity for Oliver to pitch himself as a comedic performer, and Life360 benefits from prominent placement on Oliver’s social accounts with tens of millions of followers.

E! Co-Founder Larry Namer Predicts Vertical Video Will Become the Dominant Way People Consume Content by 2030

Larry Namer insists that vertical video is here to stay and won’t fully replace TV and film, but should be considered as part of the same ecosystem. Namer warns against Hollywood’s tendency to throw money at a burgeoning platform, and instead encourages investment in the current audience saying, “Produce for the audience, not for yourself.”

Grab responds to microdrama drama, but marketing intent deserves credit

Singapore-based concierge app Grab teased its first branded microdrama last week with the title I Fell in Love With My Grab Driver, which quickly sparked backlash regarding the potential danger of harassment from concierge services. Grab released a statement, explaining that they leaned into the genre for the title. Representative Mindy Yap shares that they chose to make a microdrama in order to showcase their customer, pulling local Singaporean talent and locations. Yap says they still see real potential in this strategy, but they’re learning along the way.

Colombia’s Idilio raises US$5m to scale microdrama platform

TV host and Miss Colombia 2018, Gabriela Tafur, closed $5M in a seed round for Spanish-speaking microdrama platform Idilio. Notably, Jeffrey Katzenberg’s investment firm participated. Katzenberg was also heavily involved in Quibi, the microdrama predecessor that is often quoted as being ahead of the scripted vertical curve.

David Oyelowo & Nate Parker’s Mansa Studios Debuts Slate Of TikTok Microdramas

Mansa Studios will launch three original dark romance microdrama series on TikTok. Oyelowo and Parker are dedicated to championing Black stories and are looking to microdramas as a way of hooking a dedicated audience.

How to Adapt Existing IP for Microdramas

Adaptations are the bread and butter of microdrama studios, as they can be the bridge for a new viewer to become interested in scripted vertical programming. But how do you make your adaptation memorable as opposed to yet another Cinderella story?

If you’re modernizing a classic story, you have to have a deep understanding of not only the original plot but also the characters and their desires. Sometimes the best way to do that is to flip the story on its head and focus on a character other than the original main character. Alternatively, you can have more creative control by adapting a story from history or pop culture.

Modern Tribulations

A modern day adaptation can crumble as soon as someone pulls out an iPhone or mentions social media. Obviously 2026 poses hundreds of challenges to the conflicts and plot points of a story written before 1920. The writers have to honor the spirit of the original in order for the story to work.

Emmy award winning series The Lizzie Bennet Diaries premiered in 2012 on YouTube and told the Pride and Prejudice story through the lens of a YouTuber. In Austen’s novel, Lizzie’s opinion of Darcy shifts after he intervenes in the marriage of Lydia Bennet and George Wickham. The web series honored the stakes of this plot point by having Wickham plan to release a sex tape of Lydia. This change was more impactful to an audience that had witnessed the rise of revenge porn and celebrity sex tapes in a way that a runaway marriage couldn’t.

The series used the same visual language that YouTube viewers were accustomed to. Lizzie recorded from her bedroom, editing included jump cuts and end screens, and even a couple of VidCon vlogs. This bridged the gap for audience members who primarily watched vlog content, or sketch comedy on the platform. The show was organic to YouTube.

Nothing Much to Do (2014) is another YouTube series of note, the New Zealand-based project adapted Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing into a vlog series that further immersed its characters into YouTube culture. They wove plot points into YouTube challenges, Q&As, and “storytime” videos. The story was strung together over three different channels that had distinctly different formats and camera work.

These adaptations brought classic stories into the modern age by leaning into the platform and honoring the characters and stakes of the original works.

The Anti-Hero

With the success of Wicked, I hope that some microdramas take a chance on adapting a character-based retelling. What’s essential with these adaptations is the character study. The plot of the original work needs to be upheld while you give more context to your anti-hero.

In Wicked, the audience learns how the Cowardly Lion became cowardly and how the Tin Man became heartless. Those characters still join Dorothy on her journey, but the audience sees Oz through the Wicked Witch’s eyes instead of the Kansas ingenue’s. Neither the book, the musical, or the movie would work if time and care wasn’t taken with building Elphaba’s internal life and obstacles.

2011’s Once Upon a Time did this dozens of times over with characters from Grimm’s fairy tales, Peter Pan, The Wizard of Oz, Greek mythology, and more. Recently, the BBC has had success with The Other Bennet Sister, which follows Mary Bennet from Pride and Prejudice. Netflix’s Enola Holmes released its third installment earlier this year, and hit over 20M views in the first week. When a new adaptation of Cinderella or Jane Austen’s titles seems to come out every year, a different angle on these stories can excite fans.

Real People Fiction

Alternatively, there’s the option to adapt a fictionalized version of true events. Ryan Murphy makes headlines every year or two with his pulpy dramas about American villains and royalty: Love Story, Monster, The Assassination of Gianni Versace, etc. He’s frequently in hot water due to the fact that he chooses stories with living subjects and doesn’t take any steps to disguise the story with different names, locations, or identifying details.

However, more historical adaptations have been able to approach their subject matter with creativity and humor. My Lady Grey turned England’s nine days queen into a fantasy heroine and quickly built a cult following despite its early cancellation. Hulu’s The Great adapted Catherine II of Russia’s story into a dark comedy. America could be due for its own lighthearted adaptation of historical events. In contrast to the anti-hero storyline, historical accuracy isn’t required for these stories to work. There’s more to be gained by modernizing the characters for a fish-out-of-water comedy than adhering to the strictest timeline of events.

However, there have been more modern retellings that successfully hint at their inspiration while avoiding controversy. The 90s saw multiple “normal girl meets the Prince of England” romcoms on the heels of William and Kate’s romance. 2023’s Daisy Jones and the Six evoked the drama of Fleetwood Mac. And 2024’s Christmas in the Spotlight made quick work of the most talked about relationship of the year: Taylor and Travis.

Again, the success of these stories isn’t in remaining 100% faithful to the source material, in fact sometimes that can lead to harsh criticism. These adaptations work best when you get to the root of why people are still fascinated by the story. Whether it’s the incomprehension of a grisly crime, the tragedy or legend of a historical figure, or the intrigue of romance in the public eye; there’s something that keeps people talking about it. That’s the story and that’s what will make an adaptation addicting and memorable.

TL;DR

• Modern adaptations need to feel genuinely modernized. The same characters and stakes of the original, but with the constraints of the digital age. So you need to deeply understand your characters and the obstacles of someone that age today.

• For a little bit more creative freedom, you can center your story around one of the side characters but you have to be ready to deep dive into their inner life and bring truth to their circumstances and decisions.

• Finally, you can have the biggest sandbox if you choose to play with a story from history or pop culture. But you have to drill down to the core of why people are still fascinated by those people and you have to answer their curiosity.

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: Jo Hoch

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: That Documentary Girl

Instagram: 2.1M Followers

Tik Tok: 1.3M Followers

Who Is That Documentary Girl?

Christie Boschman advises more than five million followers and subscribers what documentaries are worth watching.

Boschman has been obsessed with documentaries since she was young. She was nine when years old when she first she saw Rob Stewart’s Sharkwater. Then she eventually attended Toronto Film School, initially thinking she might work in fiction, but nonfiction kept her attention.

That Documentary Girl started with a simple observation. There were endless accounts recommending movies and television, but very few devoted entirely to documentaries. Boschman posted one recommendation, people responded, and she kept posting.

True crime is a big focus of the community, but the account stretches well beyond it into music, sports, nature, scams, cults, social justice, and independent films that barely registered when they were first released.

People are not following Boschman because they generally like pop culture. They are there because they like documentaries and need less obvious titles to watch. That makes her recommendation unusually powerful.

Boschman has talked about posting a documentary that had been sitting quietly on transactional platforms and seeing it climb to number one on Apple TV rentals the next day. Filmmakers now lobby her directly because her support can put a film in front of millions of people who already love to watch nonfiction.

For an independent documentary, that kind of concentrated attention can be hard to come by. A trailer might reach a larger random audience and do very little. Boschman can talk about a film to a smaller but far more relevant group and suddenly people are renting it, discussing it, and sending it to friends.

That Documentary Girl has become a curator in the typical sense of the word. Her followers trust in her taste and vision of non fiction works.

Boschman recently asked her community to put forwrad the best documentaries ever made. Nine of the top ten came from Netflix. Studios including Prime Video, Hulu, Lifetime, and Netflix have hired her for campaigns, while independent filmmakers use the same concentrated audience to give smaller documentaries a real shot at being seen.

Christie’s Movie Club runs through Patreon, where members watch and discuss documentaries together. The DocuList packages recommendations into guides organized around subjects like true crime, music, cults, nature, and scams. She also has merch, aimed squarely at people who have made watching documentaries part of their identity.

Boschman has spoken at Hot Docs about film marketing and is developing a television series and documentary coffee-table book.

For filmmakers, the value is big. Boschman does not simply have a large community. She has a concentrated group made up of the exact people a documentary producer is trying to reach.

@thatdocumentarygirlWatch on Paramount + #fyp #documentaries #documentary #whattowatch #mustwatch #truecrime #doctok #paramount

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Three Things We Love About That Documentary Girl

Her recommendations can help a documentary become widely known: Boschman has seen films climb rental charts after she posts about them. Her community arrives looking for documentaries, which gives an independent filmmaker access to viewers who are already interested.

She keeps digging after release weekend: A documentary can vanish quickly if nobody knows where to find it. Boschman regularly pulls older, independent, international, and overlooked films back in front of people.

She has concentrated on the documentary world: The recommendations, movie club, DocuList, polls, and conversations all serve nonfiction fans. For a documentary filmmaker, very little of that reach is wasted.

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Mitch wrote the first version of this piece more than a year ago. Somehow, it feels even more relevant now.

We’re being forced to reconsider what intellectual property is, where it begins, and who gets to own it. The next great franchise might emerge from a Reddit post, a meme, or an inside joke developed collectively by thousands of people—not from a studio development slate. Its value may belong less to a single creator or company than to the community that participates in its creation, transformation, and spread.

That’s because content is no longer something an audience simply receives. It is increasingly interactive: remixed, extended, performed, and turned into something new.

The audience is becoming part of the creative process, and the boundary between consuming culture and making it is disappearing fast.

The music industry—and DJ culture in particular—understood this shift long before the rest of media. In the piece below, our Resident Gardener Mitch Camarda explores what remix culture, live experience, and creative mastery can teach us about building IP in this new world order.

It’s worth revisiting. Happy Labor Day.

— Ben

I've lived through a media revolution before. But I didn't recognize it at first.

In 2010 at Pacha NYC, Dirty South and Axwell’s remix of 'Sweet Disposition' hit me so hard it rewired my brain. DJs, once background noise, now headline Madison Square Garden. That explosive shift taught me how quickly democratized creativity can reshape entire industries—exactly what's happening today with creators.

That late night experience led me to help build Vibe Magazine's dance music coverage and eventually book hundreds of shows as a programmer and talent buyer.

More importantly, it taught me to recognize the patterns of creative disruption before they become obvious to everyone else.

DJ culture offers us a unique lens for seeing around corners—showing us not what might happen, but what's already in motion.

Remix Culture Shows Where Creative Value Really Lives

What DJs did: DJs proved that the most valuable creativity often happens between existing works — not in isolation. Daft Punk didn’t kill disco; they revived it for a new generation. Avicii didn’t replace folk music; he blended it with EDM and reached audiences who’d never have found it otherwise.

Remix wasn’t reduction — it was multiplication.

How it transformed their business: This mindset cracked open new markets. One hit song didn’t mean one version: a popular track might inspire a dozen remixes, each drawing in different fan communities and extending the song’s shelf life. Labels that embraced this saw bigger back catalogs and longer revenue tails.

@zedsdeadTurn any grandma into a dubstep fan with this simple trick #dubstep #edm #brooklynmirage #nyc #franksinatra #zedsdead #deadbeats

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DJs didn’t just make new songs — they made old songs valuable again.

How we can use it now: The current tension between AI creators and legacy IP holders mirrors the sampling battles of the '90s and 2000s. Disney and Universal's recent lawsuit against Midjourney echoes the same anxieties that drove Grand Upright Music v. Warner Bros. and Campbell v. Acuff-Rose.

Companies want control; creators want freedom to transform. DJ culture shows the winning path isn’t to police remixing but to channel it.

Imagine if, instead of fighting AI reimaginings of The Godfather, studios licensed multiple reinterpretations — one retold in modern Lagos, one as a sci-fi epic, one from Diane Keaton’s POV. One of these could unlock new audiences and fresh revenue streams for decades.

The lesson: companies that build remix-friendly ecosystems will unlock compounding value. Epic Games nailed this with Fortnite — every user-generated map or skin feeds the core IP. Music labels who embraced multiple remixes per song saw more streams, not cannibalization.

What this means for legacy media: Don’t build walls around your best ideas — build infrastructure for others to play with them. The next growth engine isn’t just new originals; it’s letting your stories evolve through reinterpretation, collaboration, and cultural cross-pollination.

DJ culture proves this doesn’t dilute value — it multiplies it.

Live Experiences Create Unreproducible Value

What DJs did: DJs knew that recorded music alone wouldn’t build real loyalty — unforgettable live shows would. Eric Prydz’s HOLO shows aren’t just concerts; they are immersive light-and-sound worlds you can’t stream later. Spain’s Elrow parties transform venues into wild, themed playgrounds where strangers became a pop-up community for one night only.

How it transformed their business: This insight flipped the economics of dance music. The live circuit — festivals, residencies, and tours — became the true profit engine. DJs went from side acts to headliners commanding stadium money. Fans didn’t just remember songs — they told stories about nights that couldn’t be pirated.

How we can use it now: Today’s digital-first creators are catching on. Danny Gonzalez turns YouTube sketches into sold-out live comedy tours. Ludwig sells out venues worldwide after building fame on Twitch. Gaming expos have evolved from industry booths to fan-powered culture festivals.

As content gets cheaper and more abundant, experience becomes the premium layer: live, local, and impossible to duplicate.

The emerging model: ‘Experiential Content’

Imagine Robert Rodriguez announcing his next film won’t just hit theaters — it’s launching as a multi-city cultural tour, each location offering something impossible to replicate:

• Austin: The premiere happens at Creator Camp — fans watch, but also join live Q&As, shoot bonus scenes, and test Rodriguez’s own gear in pop-up filmmaking workshops.

• Brooklyn: A warehouse turns into the film’s set, built out in full detail. Before and after the screening, the audience explores the story’s world and sees new installations by local street artists inspired by the film’s themes.

• Nashville: Local musicians perform a live soundtrack during key scenes, blurring the line between movie and concert.

• Denver: An overnight outdoor screening where fans camp under the stars, then spend the next day in hands-on workshops learning Rodriguez’s DIY techniques — proving the film’s core idea that anyone can make something great.

Every city adds exclusive scenes, local merch, and a community moment that can’t be streamed the next day. Fans don’t just consume the film — they co-create the cultural footprint around it.

What this means for legacy media: When content is infinite, people pay for connection. DJ culture shows that experiences bind audiences tighter than passive consumption ever could. Creators and companies that build experiential layers will win deeper loyalty and new revenue.

In the next wave, the most valuable releases won’t just play in theaters — they’ll happen in the real world, and the story will keep growing after the credits roll.

Mastery Wins When Tools Are Ubiquitous

What DJs did: During the EDM boom, everyone got access to the same tools. Ableton, Logic, free sample packs, endless YouTube tutorials — the bedroom producer was born. But not everyone with a laptop became a global DJ.

The market got crowded fast. Loud drops and flashy effects became commodities overnight. The DJs who endured didn’t just push buttons — they evolved into complete musicians: Calvin Harris wrote pop hooks that worked on radio and the festival main stage. Avicii fused folk melodies with dance beats and told stories through sound that hit deeper than a simple club banger.

How it transformed their business: This skill leap let the best DJs break out of the dance niche and dominate pop culture. They scored top radio hits, lucrative residencies, brand deals — and their songs outlasted trend cycles that buried lesser imitators.

Being good at the tool was table stakes. Being great at the craft made careers.

What it means for creators and legacy media: Raw access to AI will keep raising the floor — but it won’t raise the ceiling. The creators who master character, narrative, and emotional resonance will stand out while the clones fade away.

And here’s the chance for legacy players to stop gatekeeping and start developing. Help emerging creators evolve from short clips to compelling series, from catchy edits to lasting IP. The best labels didn’t fear bedroom producers — they found the real talent and helped them grow beyond loops and drops.

The lesson: DJ culture proves it: democratized tools create a wave of output, but true mastery builds a lasting career. AI will flood the market with passable content. But craft, voice, and story are the new moat.

The future belongs to those who treat AI as an instrument — not the whole band.

Looking Around Corners

DJ culture gives us a cheat sheet for what comes next. The patterns are clear:

• Remix culture will thrive — but the real value will go to those who build ecosystems where reinterpretation expands the pie.

• Experiences will be the premium layer — moments no algorithm or AI can replicate.

• Democratized tools like AI will flood the market with content — but mastery and storytelling will separate timeless work from disposable trends.

The smartest creators already know this: they use new tools but don’t chase novelty for novelty’s sake.

They double down on craft — memorable characters, emotional arcs, worlds worth revisiting — because that’s what endures long after the remix goes viral and the hype fades.

For legacy media, the edge isn’t owning the newest tool. It’s owning the oldest truth: great storytelling always wins.

Partner with the next wave of creators, help them master narrative craft, and build experiences fans can’t just scroll past.

DJ culture didn’t replace musicianship — it reminded us that new tech changes how we make things, but craft decides what lasts.

Amid all the AI breakthroughs, viral stunts, and algorithm tweaks, keep your eye on the fundamentals. The next era won’t belong to whoever tries the most tools. It’ll belong to whoever tells the best story.

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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 quietly redefining what it means to make and watch scripted content in the mobile age.

This week, Kevin Hart’s production company signs on for over 20 microdrama projects, a major Korean film company joins the scripted vertical industry, and some more examples of recognizable IP going vertical. Plus a review of Nuuly’s microseries marketing campaign.

But First-

I learned something important this week.

And I think it could be useful for others as we careen towards each other in this evolving landscape.

Let’s listen to each other, yes. But may I also say…

Let’s make extra sure we’re being heard.

(Asking ourselves if we’re explaining things well. Starting with ourselves.)

I’ve been trading deal terms with a potential partner on an ambitious endeavor. I was concerned about the path forward. It seemed like a central deal point might simply be irreconcilable.

But people around me were candid, and we asked ourselves: Were we truly making our needs clear? Not just technically clear, but completely understood?

So we eliminated the ambiguity. And because we suspected some of the meaning was getting lost in tone, I picked up the phone.

My moment came, and I gave a short monologue. No hedging. No ambiguity. Just a clear expression of what we needed, why we needed it, and why I believed in it.

And you know what?

When I was done, there was warmth and collaboration again. The air was back in the room. The future ahead had shape.

And we’re back trading paper.

I don’t celebrate anything until it’s signed. But I’m really excited about the potential that’s here.

And it all came from getting really clear.

And we started with ourselves.

Like so much often does.

Alright, let’s get into it-

Kevin Hart’s Hartbeat To House Vertical Originals On Microdrama Platform aTwist

aTwist continues its Hollywood recruitment with Kevin Hart’s production company signing on for more than 20 microseries titles. Deadline announced that their slate will be anchored by adaptations of bestselling author Blake Karrington’s books. Hartbeat’s president shared that they’re seeking to tell stories that “the mainstream overlooked” and noted that partnering with a popular author also helps them tap into an engaged audience.

Korea’s Showbox Launches Microdrama Label Showbite, Sets Sights on Global Markets (EXCLUSIVE)

One of the largest Korean film distribution companies is launching its own microdrama label, starting on Tiktok, YouTube, and Instagram this month. Variety covers 14 slated titles, checking off nearly every popular genre with romance, fantasy, period pieces, and mystery.

‘How could you re-create perfection?’: Inside Astral Tequila’s microdrama homage to ‘Practical Magic 2’

Astral Tequila brand director Jenn Rapp shares insights into building a microdrama into a brand deal. Rapp emphasizes that the goal was never to try to perfectly recreate the original margarita scene in Practical Magic, but to use it as inspiration for a new story geared toward younger viewers. They’ve partnered with models-turned reality TV stars and real-life sisters, Brooks and Grace Ann Nader, for the project.

Indie VG ‘Astro Burn’ Starts New Level with AI-Powered Animated Micro-Series

Independently produced video game Astro Burn is cross-promoting the game through a microseries that will upload on Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube. Game designer, HaZ Dulull, emphasizes his creative control and human-led approach to a partially AI-generated production. Showcraft, the AI platform he utilized, sped up the process of creating a story he wrote which he thinks will be valuable in marketing the indie game.

aTwist launches today, bringing a trio of respected TV execs into the microseries boom

The microseries platform aTwist officially launches today, led by three career Hollywood execs betting on vertical storytelling as legacy media continues to contract. We’ve mentioned aTwist in this Bloom and previous editions because of the headline-worthy talent they’ve recruited, but today marks the platform’s official arrival. Jana Winograde explains that amidst the decline of legacy media, she saw more promise in the rise of vertical storytelling. She and her partners are eagerly joining the “wild west” of digital microseries and are putting a lot of trust in up-and-coming talent.

Heart On My Sleeve

Platform: TikTok, Instagram, YouTube

Logline: When Wally is invited to yet another wedding, she’s determined to find her perfect plus one. Will she meet the man of her dreams, or is our girl destined to spend eternity at the Singles Table?

Genre: Romantic Comedy

Nuuly’s new microseries, Heart On My Sleeve, is a well targeted marketing campaign delivered by way of romantic comedy. The microseries follows a quirky-cool 20-something as her friends coach her through dating app disasters, in hopes of finding a date for an upcoming wedding. And in the end, she falls for the boy that was there all along.

The series, totaling 12 episodes and just over 14 minutes, is one of the best branded microseries I’ve seen. Though, I think it’s just the start of what a microseries story can accomplish.

The series is written and directed by Milky Tran, a filmmaker and micro-influencer who you may know from her “3 Adult Things That Happened to Me This Week As An Adult” series. Nuuly’s choice to collaborate with her is brilliant. Tran has been showcasing her writing and filmmaking on her TikTok account and it’s clear that her work resonates with people. Her style is sarcastic, witty, and vulnerable with colorful visuals and playful effects. Her content has become instantly recognizable and has been specified over the course of dozens of one(ish) minute videos.

Her fast-paced storytelling is critical for scripted vertical shows and her editing style lends itself naturally to the cinematic language of microdramas. In Heart On My Sleeve, Tran’s dialogue flows naturally and the jokes are punctuated with smart editing that is attuned to the social media landscape. Edits that indicate a touch of magic realism such as the sped up exit of a character, a fourth wall break, a smash zoom, and whimsical effects are the common language of social media content.

The cast is led by Wally Baram, a writer and comedian who recently became known as one of the stars of Prime’s coming-of-age comedy Overcompensating. Her timing and personality bring charisma to the role. Her friends-to-lovers romantic lead is played by Charles Hsu, an actor who is best known for his POV sketch comedy videos on TikTok. Chine Ikoro rounds out the core friend group, she’s a UCB New York Mainstage performer and she offers a lighthearted whimsy to Baram’s less optimistic character.

I believe the biggest success of this series lies in the on and off screen digital-native talent. These creatives are knowledgeable in the traditional lanes of acting and directing, but they’ve cut their teeth in vertical digital content. What results is performances that feel organic on the small screen and storytelling that sucks a scroller in.

The plot is recognizable, it’s a classic rom-com setup, but the specificity of the dates and tribulations of modern romance make it fresh and funny. The sound design was particularly well-suited for microdrama, with flourishes and swelling scores that would feel campy in a TV show or movie, but keep the vertical viewer locked in.

Nuuly’s campaign is perfectly attuned to its target audience. The plot directly speaks to one of the primary needs they address: formal attire rental. But they’re able to naturally fold in their other clothing rental options under the guise of a classic rom-com makeover. Wally is the hero of the story, but is also an example of their target demographic.

That customer is also likely to be engaged by a well made rom-com that they stumble upon while scrolling. Particularly with a first episode that starts in media res with a lot of energy and eye-catching editing.

Overall, the series does a great job of utilizing talented artists who are familiar with digital storytelling to produce a sweet, funny romantic comedy that organically promotes Nuuly’s brand and offerings. It’s also one of the stronger romantic comedy microseries that I’ve seen, but I think there are a few things that could’ve pushed it above and beyond current expectations of microdramas.

The script is fun and current, however the characters are missing some heart. Wally seeks romance as a solution to a problem proposed by a friend, not necessarily out of her own desire for a relationship. Her happily ever after lands more like a task being crossed off of a list than a hard won true love.

Wally and David are childhood friends and roommates who have been secretly harboring feelings for each for years. This is revealed in the penultimate episode with a bro-y shove and a laugh before we’re quickly ushered into the finale. Microdramas rely on quick pacing, but if there’s ever a moment to take a little more time, it’s in the climax. By that point, the audience is locked in and wants to share in the main characters’ catharsis.

There’s a reason why the sweeping “run to the airport” scene has become so iconic. It’s usually a long sequence of traffic and blocking, but the audience laps it up because it’s crescendoing to what they’ve been waiting for.

The audience is clued into David’s feelings in the first episode with onscreen text that informs the viewer he “definitely doesn’t have a crush on Wally”. Unfortunately, that’s about all we learn about David’s interior life. An obstacle never appears between him and Wally, so there’s nothing for him to overcome leading up to his admission.

On the other hand, the audience doesn’t get any signs that Wally is withholding her feelings. Her dates are all terrible on their own accord, not because of her own conflicted desires. This causes the story to suffer from a common rom-com issue in which any other possible suitor is so awful that the only course of romantic survival is for the main character to choose the story’s love interest. I find that particular plot device can cheapen the romance and kill the stakes of the climactic moment.

I’m aware that there was likely some pressure from production to keep the project under a certain time constraint. But it’s worth considering that details like these can take a microseries from being something a viewer stumbled upon and enjoyed to being a show that they share with friends and return to over and over again.

Also, a lot of these details could’ve been portrayed without adding much to the run time. Wally mentions on a date that she’s an art teacher and we see that she has two roommates, and yet their home is a pristine rental property. We could get a glimpse into Wally’s interior world through her artwork if it took up space in their home. A few cutaways to her working on a piece could be incredibly informative of her feelings.

Her relationship with David could be emphasized by photos of the two of them growing up or pairs of matching memories: diplomas, ticket stubs, souvenir shot glasses. We could also learn more about David if his decor clearly contrasts Wally’s. Maybe his personal items disappear from their shared space as she continues to go on these dates. A vertical viewer isn’t sitting across the room from their screen, it’s inches from their face. Small details can pack a punch in a small frame.

Heart On My Sleeve is a great microseries to take some time to watch. They’re doing a lot of things really well with this project, and it can inspire you to think of what could be possible with the format.

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: Jo Hoch

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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: Arianna Papalexopoulos

Instagram: 276K Followers

Youtube: 30.5K Subscribers

Tik Tok: 297.1K Followers

Who Is Arianna Papalexopoulos?

As I write this from Athens, it felt appropriate to feature a creator who has built an audience on both sides of the Atlantic.

Enter Arianna Papalexopoulos.

Arianna built her audience playing the Greek mothers, aunts, cousins, and family friends she grew up around. Greek Mom is the character most people know. She is loud, loving, intrusive, and suspicious of anything that did not come from a Greek kitchen.

Papalexopoulos grew up in San Francisco with a Greek father from Kalavryta and an Italian-American mother. As a teenager, she spent summers in her father’s hometown, staying with relatives who did not speak English. She knows the family dynamics well enough to exaggerate them without turning them into generic ethnic comedy.

After graduating from UCLA’s School of Theater, Film and Television, Papalexopoulos and actress Megan Timpane started the YouTube channel TwinGirlPeeks because neither had much of an acting reel. They stopped waiting for roles and started writing and shooting their own sketches.

She later earned a master’s degree in Digital Media from USC and worked in influencer marketing. During the pandemic, she started putting more time into her own videos and writing more directly about Greek-American life.

One early sketch followed an American guy on a date with a Greek-American woman. Papalexopoulos wondered if something that specific would mean much outside her own circle. It did. Greeks in the U.S., Australia, Canada, Germany, the U.K., and Greece began finding the videos.

More family characters followed, along with sketches about dating, church, food, language, soccer, and the small cultural battles that happen when immigrant families raise American kids.

She has kept one foot in scripted work. Papalexopoulos wrote, produced, and acted in It’s a Greek Thing, an eight-episode comedy series that played the San Francisco Greek Film Festival. She co-wrote Greek Enough and has produced and acted in shorts including Como, Ti Amo and The Curious Case of the Sacred Lamb.

She also produced and acted in Jaunt, the debut feature from her brother, filmmaker Alexi Papalexopoulos.

Stand-up came later. After making videos with Greek-Canadian comedian Angelo Tsarouchas in 2023, Papalexopoulos began opening for him.

Papalexopoulos still describes herself as an actor and producer. She just does not have to wait for an audition to perform anymore. She can write something, shoot it, put it online, and find out directly whether her Greek followers recognize themselves in it.

Three Things We Love About Arianna Papalexopoulos

She never watered down the Greek stuff: Kalavryta, theias, Orthodox holidays, Greek mothers, food, language, and family expectations gave the comedy its audience rather than limiting it. People recognize the details because she leaves them in.

She started by making the reel herself: TwinGirlPeeks existed because Papalexopoulos and Megan Timpane needed acting footage and decided to shoot their own. That same instinct carried into It’s a Greek Thing, Greek Enough, the shorts, and Jaunt.

She can move from character work into straight performance: Greek Mom may be the entry point, but Papalexopoulos has also built scripted projects, produced features, and taken stand-up on the road. The character gets attention without boxing her into one kind of work.

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Sometimes, the most inspiring things I hear come from private or casual conversations. They get stuck in my head in an obsessive loop as I work out their implications.

Here are three. Turns out they are all connected…

1. NO to AI… but be ready.

The first came from a VFX supervisor who spends his time inside the major shops—the vendors that handle the heavy lifting for studio tentpoles. He was relaying what those shops are hearing from their clients:

It is not a story about whether AI is good enough. It’s an order to stand by. This is all about errors-and-omissions insurance and chain of title.

E&O coverage is a condition of distribution at Netflix, Amazon, Apple, and Disney+. To write the policy, a carrier needs a chain-of-title review establishing that every element in the film was either created originally or properly licensed. A model trained on scraped material cannot produce that. So most 2026 E&O policies now carry explicit AI exclusions or require a representation that the production contains no AI-generated material that can’t be cleared. No E&O, no distribution. Full stop.

Technical problems resolve gradually and unevenly, which is what creates early-mover advantage. Legal problems just slow down what gets released in the world and where.

In some cases, the cost of readiness is being pushed down onto the vendors.

The VFX shops are being told to build, staff, and maintain a capability they cannot bill against a single shot, for an indefinite period, at their own expense.

That is a mandate they have to pay for themselves in a business on the point of extinction. Remember Rhythm & Hues? They won the visual effects Oscar for Life of Pi eleven days after filing for bankruptcy. That is the historical baseline for how much cushion this business carries.

At the same time, some—maybe all—of the studios are developing or buying their own tech. Netflix. Amazon. Is it a coincidence that they are both tech-first companies? Maybe not. They may well be trying to connect AI to their stock price.

Will the AI floodgates open all at once? I don’t think so. There will be fits and starts. Tech that seems bulletproof will turn into lawsuits. Other technology will quietly work its way into workflows without pomp or circumstance.

For filmmakers? Stay infinitely curious. Whether it becomes an advantage or mere survival, you have to keep up.

But who needs to wait?

There are podcasts made entirely with AI that are monetizing. Surely they don’t have clean copyrights. Ditto on social media platforms.

But here’s the example I’m most curious about—just one, but with much bigger implications. Friends of mine in an unnamed country in Latin America are using AI throughout their pipeline in ways that would not pass muster in the US. They finance independently, release their movies theatrically, and then sell them to the streamers. They have at least three movies on streamers now using AI in questionable ways.

But they are walking through the back door, through post-production delivery departments outside the US that don’t subject the content to the same scrutiny those platforms apply in other territories. I assume Europe is as strict as the US.

So while US filmmakers are learning the tools but can’t implement them, filmmakers in other parts of the world are doing reps and getting paid for it…

2. The Youtube Floodgates are Open but the Deluge has just Begun

The second came from a friend who, among other things, helps studios organize their content strategies. Over lunch, she casually offered:

I guess we all know this, right? Somehow it hit me harder in that moment.

YouTube took 13.8% of all US television watch time in May—the largest share of any single distributor, ahead of Netflix, and a record. YouTube is not the future of distribution. It’s the present tense of it. The libraries follow the audience. They always have.

So picture the supply side: every studio shelf of unmonetized titles, every production company back catalog, plus a generation of AI creators producing at a marginal cost approaching zero. Producers launching shows direct to YouTube… An enormous amount of content arriving on one surface in a short window.

Here’s what I can’t reconcile, and what makes this interesting rather than obvious.

At the exact moment supply is about to go vertical, the biggest creators on the platform are moving in the other direction. MrBeast announced a 2026 reset built around what he called “ultra grind mode,” saying plainly that recent videos were “not as good as I wanted.”

Not more videos. Better ones.

Colin and Samir have been tracking the broader return to vlogging—the most sophisticated operators in the business going back to the least sophisticated format available.

Are these two connected in some way?

When content becomes infinite, content stops being the asset.

A library is inventory, and inventory in an abundant market prices toward marginal cost—which AI is driving to zero. What cannot be flooded is a specific person being specifically themselves on a Tuesday. The vlog is the least scalable thing on the internet. That is precisely why it’s appreciating.

To me, the bigger implication is handmade content. This is why I would bet on assisted AI to bring prices down before I’d bet on AI Gen. I just wrote about this last week.

But the impact is broader still and we watched this movie before—in music.

Streaming made every recording ever made instantly available. Catalog value went down. The money moved to live performance and the direct artist-fan relationship. The recording became the marketing; the show became the business.

YouTube is running that play on film and television catalog right now. The library becomes the marketing. The open question is what the show is.

If studios start strategically putting their content online as the market floods with content from all sides, they aren’t looking only to monetize what they have. They have to build the next business from it.

Which, to me, all comes back to one simple thing: Does your content have—or can it build—a real community?

All of a sudden, the relevant question in this discussion—whether the content is AI-generated, comes from studio libraries, or is Bro-Hollywood, whatever it is—is whether it can become part of a bigger flywheel.

I don’t know if any of this is surprising. But I can’t stop thinking about it…

3. Could Fede Álvarez Still Break In Today?

The third came from a major producer and former studio executive. She was talking about how good the AI tools have become for building concept trailers, how fast you can now get a look and a tone in front of a buyer.

But we both pondered their value in the marketplace.

She talked about the olden days—20 years ago?—when certain directors used rip-o-matics to sell their movies. This was once a moat. They weren’t easy to make. You had to pull scenes and clips from other movies and string them together into a coherent trailer. That, plus a script, sold a movie. But you needed amazing talent behind the scenes to make them compelling.

She worked for one such director, who was hired to make the biggest commercials in the world. He had editors in-house. They used rip-o-matics for the commercial world. He would put them to work on his movie concepts and in their moment, they stood out because they were so hard to pull off well…

Then there was the Short as Calling Card phase. The best reference: In 2009, Álvarez made a four-and-a-half-minute short called Ataque de Pánico!—giant robots destroying Montevideo—for a reported $300 and put it on YouTube.

Within days, he had a widely reported $30 million deal with Sam Raimi’s Ghost House Pictures. He went on to direct Evil Dead, Don’t Breathe, and Alien: Romulus.

The thing that made that short was the to make something like that.

In 2009, a filmmaker in Uruguay producing a VFX driven short taking place in a part of the world where we couldn’t imagine it ever happening for $300 was attention grabbing.

The goal wasn’t just showing you an idea. It was proving a capability. The demo was the credential.

Here’s a piece of the puzzle that calls back to the point I was making about filmmakers in Latin America working with AI tools now: VFX shops in Latin America could prosper only if they bought some or all of their VFX tools on the black market. The licenses were just too expensive. This is kind of a version of the innovator’s dilemma… Those who play by the rules lose? But I digress…

As far as trailers go, anyone can generate a competent concept trailer this afternoon. It is no longer evidence of anything. When the cost of the demo goes to zero, the demo stops functioning as proof.

So the barrier relocated. The question is where.

Not entirely to craft—the machines are absorbing some of that. The bar gets much higher, for sure. A great concept trailer today needs more and more human intervention. The pure Gen AI stuff feels like pure Gen AI. It’s about specificity. It’s about pushing the tools to make something that feels unique—in every frame.

Most importantly, it needs a POV. It needs a real director making real, specific decisions, not leaving those decisions to chance.

In fact, most concept trailers look like trailers from the early aughts. But the best trailers today don’t even try to tell the story.

So part of the puzzle is more human intervention. Where a rip-o-matic was literally melding 30 different directors’ content into a single story that a totally different director would one day make, a concept trailer needs the most originality and precision possible to have a chance.

But that’s just the first piece.

Because mostly, the barrier has moved to validation.

A concept trailer with forty million views and a real argument in the comments is still proof—not proof that you can execute, but proof that somebody cares. The audience becomes the credential.

That’s not really new. First, Fede Álvarez created an amazing short. Then it went viral. Then Sam Raimi “discovered” him.

The old barrier was capability, and capability can be beaten by one talented person working alone. The new barrier is attention, and attention can be beaten only by an audience built over years. The tools that were supposed to democratize the entry point may have quietly raised it.

Where the Three Meet

We’re all talking about the same thing every day, and we don’t even know it. It’s about value. It’s about scarcity. How do we create value in a world of infinite content?

The first story says that technical capability is no longer the only thing determining what gets made. Legal permission and institutional readiness matter. While the studios wait, filmmakers outside the system are doing reps, learning the tools, and getting paid for it.

The second says that when every library, producer, and AI creator pours content onto the same platform, content itself stops being scarce. The value moves somewhere else—to the person, the relationship, the community around the work.

And the third says the same thing at the level of the individual filmmaker. When anyone can make a competent concept trailer, the trailer is no longer the credential. The proof moves from the image to the audience. Can you make people care?

AI doesn’t eliminate scarcity. It relocates it.

For a long time, the ability to create polished images was scarce. Soon it won’t be. But taste is still scarce. Specificity is scarce. A point of view is scarce. An audience that trusts you is scarce. So is a production pipeline that can actually be insured, distributed, and monetized.

That creates a strange split. Production is becoming more democratic at the same time that breaking in may be getting harder. More people can make something. Far fewer can make something that can be cleared, discovered, remembered, and turned into a lasting relationship with an audience.

The cost of creation is falling. The cost of significance may be rising.

Which means “be ready” has to mean more than learning the tools. It means being ready legally, creatively, commercially, and—maybe most importantly—with a community already forming around the work.

The tools were supposed to remove the barrier. Maybe they removed one barrier and revealed the next:

Can you make it?

Can you clear it?

Can anyone find it?

Will anyone care?

And will they come back?

That’s where the three meet.

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FRESH CLIPPINGS

Craving Simplicity

We’re all familiar with just how fragmented audiences have become in the creator economy. Niche corners of the internet have won over mass media (generally).

How this translates to TV is a nightmare we all as customers grapple with to some degree. As industry vet Caroline Giegerich describes it, “Nobody wakes up wanting to manage ten thousand apps, ten thousand logins, ten thousand bills.”

And even within social apps, think about how difficult it is to consistently track those creators you love and follow. Since our algorithms are designed to keep us engaged, they’re constantly feeding us new stuff, making it hard for communities to stay engaged.

All of which has lead to what seems to be the next wave of disruption (yes, at this point, many of the disruptors have become traditionalists) that affects both legacy and creators.

It was described in this recent NY Times piece, the gist being that platforms are now competing for people to use their app and only their app.

Because as it turns out, Amazon has been playing a different game all along. Lucas Shaw reported that the retailer’s best video business is not Prime Video, but its channels program, i.e. they sell other streaming services (mainstream and niche) and take a cut of the subscription revenue / get advertising inventory in exchange.

And although Amazon is leading the charge with 67% of sign-ups for specialty services in the second quarter of the year (more than Apple, Google, Roku and everyone else combined), the NY Times coverage tells us that Netflix and YouTube are in the same race. They, too, are betting to make things simple for consumers and become the everything app.

How does this all relate to creators / legacy, though?

Perhaps this is crazy speculation, but bear with me.

Using Amazon as an example, it’s playing a game in which it’s really the best. If it’s the central home of retail, then it can also presumably become the central home of media. Sure, they’ll have Prime Video, but the true win is the interface where you can get every other channel and service. And for the other big platforms, it will be a big hit to have to shave off revenue off the top to be a part of that singular ecosystem.

For creators, we’ve seen big ones like Mark Rober, etc. put up content on Netflix, but in this new landscape, why not have the Mark Rober Channel on the Amazon interface and keep 100% ownership? (More on ownership in the next story).

If you have a strong audience, then you can build your own infrastructure around it. Just look at what Angel Studios has built.

Oh, and in case it hadn’t clocked until now, this crazy new system that’s starting to dominate the conversation is… pretty much an iteration of basic cable.

The more things change…

The Ownership Debate

Matt Belloni travelled to the Edinburgh TV Festival, where he held a panel with several top TV producers in the UK. The conversation proved to be a microcosm of what’s happening in the broader market.

The speakers were Matt; Patrick Holland, executive chair and C.E.O. of Banijay UK, (MasterChef, Big Brother); Jane Root, founder and C.E.O. of Nutopia (Limitless With Chris Hemsworth, WWII With Tom Hanks), and Dimitri Doganis, the founder and chief creative officer of Raw (The Tinder Swindler, Trainwreck).

And the crux of the discussion was IP ownership.

For all the gripes producers face about Youtube funding original productions (that has started to change recently given Netflix’s competition), one of the great things that they do have to offer is ownership. If you post something on YouTube, you as the creator own it.

Streamers like Amazon and Netflix, on the other hand, do the opposite. They buy out your show upfront and you don’t any of it for future exploitation.

This is especially important in the UK because, by law, BBC funded shows have to let the producers keep the IP (which one can argue has led to the plethora of brilliant British productions over the years). As Doganis said: “You show me the incentive, I’ll show you the outcome.”

However, the BBC money has dried up as of late, and streaming platforms have happily come in to fill the funding gap.

Producers are tired of not owning anything anymore in legacy media. For that, they must turn to YouTube or the broader creator economy. But, as everybody knows, Youtube economics are really hard. Also, the scale of shows is inherently smaller and they are brand funded.

For a TV producer, this is truly a Catch 22. Own it and sacrifice scale, or sell it and lose all future rights.

The way people are working around this is: launch on YouTube small scale, own it with the stars / creators, and then find secondary places for it where you can increase the scale.

Somehow, I think that as the convergence continues, we can come up with a better solution.

Speaking of Launching on YouTube and Scaling

Disney has struck a deal with Dhar Mann Studios where the creator will produce 20 episodes of original content for them.

The specifics of the format are TBD, but the deal fits into Disney’s stated goal of turning Disney+ into a comprehensive ecosystem that includes both creator content and traditional programming.

We’ve covered Fox’s moves in the recent past. Dhar Mann Studios itself signed a deal with Fox Entertainment earlier this year for 40 narrative-driven vertical videos.

But it now seems that Disney is taking big swings in the creator space as well.

The numbers behind Dhar Mann Studios are pretty insane: 170 million followers globally; nearly 300 million views per week across platforms. Which kind of proves the point of convergence since Dhar is one of the creators who can geniinely say, “I don’t need legacy media.”

It’ll be really interesting to see how different Dhar’s Disney content is vs. what they normally publish on YouTube.

GARDEN VIEW

HARVEST QUOTE

"I fear that, as can often happen in Hollywood, the lessons from the year might be the wrong ones – all that talk and hype and bluster about the YouTube effect and YouTube creators because of Backrooms and Obsession. It’s a gold rush mentality of anything that works on YouTube can do that. I don’t believe that’s the case. If you look at those movies, they are different. Neither of those is tied to the specificity of YouTube audiences crossing over to theaters."

— Focus Features Chairman Peter Kujawski

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 quietly redefining what it means to make, and watch, scripted content in the mobile age.

This week, the sitcom isn’t dead, it’s just waiting to be reborn as a microseries, Variety wonders if microdramas could save Hollywood, and Scott reviews a review of James’ Franco’s microdrama.

So then-

Let’s talk about James Franco.

Specifically, let’s talk about Variety’s recent review and analysis of his microseries.

It was critical, yes. It addressed much of the problematic history surrounding Franco, yes. And I’m not interested in minimizing or relitigating any of that.

But there was something else in the article that, as the eternal optimist about this medium, I couldn’t help but notice.

Because if you look at the context of the criticism, I think there’s meaningful evidence of the dramatic shift microseries continue to experience.

The article criticized Franco’s performance and what it perceived as a lack of enthusiasm for the material.

Think about what that criticism implicitly says:

Verticals deserve passionate, talented acting.

The article praised Taye Diggs for fully committing to his role in his recent CandyJar production. I obviously can’t know why Franco made the choices he did in his performance, but my read of the Variety piece was that he wasn’t giving this audience the range and commitment he had demonstrated in some of his previous work.

The premise that a microseries deserves that range and commitment is meaningful.

But there was something even more striking to me.

The article suggested that this microseries might have offered Franco a kind of renaissance with younger audiences had he executed at a high level - that some form of career comeback might have been possible had he embraced the role and committed to it as fully as he had in films like 127 Hours and The Disaster Artist.

To be very clear: whether James Franco deserves redemption, a comeback, or anything else is not my argument here.

What interests me is that one of our industry’s most important publications entertained the premise that a microseries could be the vehicle for it.

That should speak volumes about how the medium is now being perceived.

Had Franco appeared in a used-car commercial, a corporate explainer, or some other artistically disposable piece of material, the idea that he had squandered an opportunity for artistic and commercial reinvention wouldn’t even be part of the conversation.

But here it was.

In Variety.

A microseries was being discussed as a place where meaningful artistic reinvention was possible - even if, in the writer’s estimation, that opportunity was missed.

That speaks volumes to me about where we are.

I don’t want to dissect James Franco’s career and conduct. That’s a conversation where there are people far more qualified and relevant than I.

I simply wanted to highlight something I saw as meaningful:

Microseries are increasingly being discussed the same way we discuss other legitimate artistic and commercial mediums - by publications that cover those mediums at the highest level.

And with the right kind of eyes, I think you can see a glimpse of the future.

Alright, let’s get into it.

Vertical Video Economy Worth $150B, Even Without China – Owl & Co Report

Unless you’re sleeping under a rock you will have seen us cover the Owl and Co analysis that the vertical format biz is now worth $150B. Microdramas are up $1B since last year and are showing growth in subscription platforms.

The boom has tracked along with that of generative AI and I would warn companies against building an AI-centered reputation for microseries. Jesse Whittock notes, “Across the seven leading paid-for apps, series releases rose ‘more than fivefold’ since the second quarter of this year. However, average time spent per new title dropped.” The viewer’s interest is piqued but it must be rewarded with strong storytelling in order to keep them watching.

Can Microdramas Save Hollywood? Why the New Vertical Boom Isn’t Quibi 2.0

Range Media Partners’ Rachel Douglas describes being surprised by the enthusiasm from SNL alum Kenan Thompson in regards to his new vertical series for Range. Verticals are giving writers the opportunity to launch projects that streaming platforms and television won’t take a chance on. That’s the same excitement writers had around Quibi, but now we have a more robust scripted-digital business model in order to take those risks.

Here Michael Schneider points to subscription fees and pre-pandemic roll out as the primary faults of Quibi. The difference now is that most viewers are getting hooked on vertical microdramas from ad-supported platforms like TikTok and YouTube, and more and more are making the jump to subscription services. Additionally, in the post-pandemic landscape, vertical content is part of everyone’s day and the creators that inhabit that content are as familiar to viewers as news anchors and morning show hosts.

As far as saving the industry, the rise of AI-generated characters and stories has stalled the growth, but could serve as a short-lived experiment against human storytelling.

Microdramas Meet CTV: Why Short-Form Vertical Stories Are Becoming a Streaming Ad Format

Microdramas are uniquely positioned to be ad-friendly. Some of the most successful microdrama production companies based in India are prioritizing free ad-supported content because, “It’s shorter, cheaper to produce against, easier to test creatively, and it can be sold at a completion rate that most CTV in-stream formats simply cannot match, because the content itself is engineered around the same compulsion loop that keeps a viewer scrolling in the first place.”

However, advertising within microseries needs to be optimized and researched as its own topic, not simply lumped in with short-form content.

FlareFlow & Europe’s Shorts Strike Four-Title Microdrama Pact

The two microdrama platforms are teaming up to produce four new projects that will push beyond the standard genres of microdramas. As microdramas have become more recognizable as a format, the demand for higher concept stories has been building. The playground of original vertical content has been built and now is the time to start getting creative and experimenting.

Your Next Favorite Sitcom Will Be a Microseries

Legacy media companies and streaming services are dropping the ball on one of America’s favorite genres: the sitcom. Most streaming shows are given less than twelve episodes to prove their concept. Even if the end result shows promise, it can be canned in a merger or a change of leadership. Writing rooms are suffering and there aren’t enough opportunities for young writers to cut their teeth on set.

The setbacks of the sitcom in legacy, could be solved by embracing the genre in microseries.

Here’s why:

Vertical content platforms are willing to take risks on new writers and new faces. The Sundace Lab has launched a digital learning program for writers focusing on micro-series. It makes headline news whenever a traditional media celebrity is starring in a microdrama because so far they’ve been populated almost entirely with fresh faces.

The microseries structure is perfect for comedy and zany plotlines. A one minute episode is a perfect amount of time to build to a great joke, and the plot-based punchlines can one-up each other with each episode.

New audience members are drawn into a microseries by familiar formats and IP. Sitcoms are frequently reinventing popular tropes and plot lines. And something as simple as a group of five 20-something friends in a city is instantly recognizable as a setup for funny antics, heartfelt relationships, and at least one slow burn romance.

The entertainment industry is always talking about watch time. Which platform has the most of it, which creator or project on that platform has the most of it, which advertisers are on that programming is getting most of it. We tell our friends that we feel like we should spend less time watching things and then we spend the next thirty minutes recommending things to watch.

I’ve been meaning to get to the theater for The Odyssey, but I didn’t have time this week so instead I watched all nine episodes of the new Mindy Kaling sitcom, Not Suitable for Work. (You’re on a newsletter about verticals. Clearly I’m a fan of broken-up bingeable content.)

It was an imperfect first season, but had likable characters and the seasoned direction of Kaling. Then on Monday Variety announced that the show was cancelled. Over on TikTok I saw fans complaining that shows just don’t get the time they need to get good anymore. All of the titans of the sitcom format had middling performances in their first nine episodes, with many of them having an entirely skippable first season.

The early audience sticks around for the chemistry between the actors and the ridiculously unfolding plotlines, and then they’re truly rewarded once the show finds its legs. The viewers on vertical content apps are already primed for that kind of devotion.

Why pull the audience away from the platform? A lot of the recent sitcoms are even poaching digital creatives. Jack Martin (Not Suitable for Work), Jack Innanen (FX’s Adults), and Benito Skinner (Prime’s Overcompensating) were all recognizable faces from TikTok.

The talent and the audience is already on the platform, they just need the right story. Instead of getting a measly nine episodes, they would have dozens. That creative team could continue to develop the story and the characters to build an ongoing series. I foresee shows taking a similar path to Chit, building their audience in vertical content on a platform like TikTok and then moving to a horizontal format on a platform like YouTube.

Viewers are willing to devote their time to creators that they’ve built a relationship with. They want to feel the pride of being the early disciples of a great show. I think the next great sitcom writers and actors are on TikTok and YouTube right now. The microseries industry loves new talent and is taking the time to develop it.

The microseries industry is still booming, but also finding its footing. People are tuning in, but it’s up to us to keep them watching. I think the key is a combination of great storytelling and highlighting digital content creators with promising talent.

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: Jo Hoch

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: Blake Webber

Instagram: 1.7 Million Followers

Youtube: 114K Subscribers

Who Is Blake Webber?

Blake Webber started as a vape-obsessed bro people were not entirely sure was real. More than a decade later, the vape is mostly gone and the character is still here.

Webber is the alter ego of comedian Aristotle Georgeson, who began posting as Blake Vapes in 2015. Georgeson had done stand-up, trained at UCB, and worked in marketing and social media before landing on a character with a mullet, a strange voice, total confidence, and an almost spiritual devotion to blowing clouds.

By 2017, Georgeson had moved away from vaping and renamed the character Blake Webber. The character started dubbing celebrity clips, reality television, public freakouts, rappers, influencers, and whatever else happened to be moving through the feed.

Blake eventually moved beyond Instagram. Georgeson built a live show around the character, including a fake motivational TED Talk, music, visuals, and crowd work. He has DJed as Blake and appeared on Netflix’s Cooking on High and Viceland’s Flophouse.

Georgeson later joined Jake Adams, Griff Pippin, and Mark Smalls on Country Club Adjacent. The golf podcast and video series has logged nearly 200 episodes and built its own lane around tournaments, players, press conferences, and a sport that has become increasingly comfortable with creator media.

His newer work with Brent Pella has opened another pair of characters.

Georgeson and Pella created Grik and Carl, two blue aliens trying to understand humans. They walk around Earth asking ordinary people questions and treating everyday behavior like something that deserves serious investigation.

The characters are now the basis for We Out Here, a scripted TV comedy Georgeson and Pella are developing with Happy Madison Productions.

Blake Webber has lasted because Georgeson never treated the character like a one-joke account. The vape disappeared, the voice stayed, and the work kept changing around it. Country Club Adjacent gave him another world to play in, while Grik and Carl opened the door to something much bigger with We Out Here.

Three Things We Love About Blake Webber

He turned the feed into source material: Once Blake moved beyond vaping, Georgeson could drop the character into celebrity clips, reality TV, public freakouts, and whatever else the internet was talking about that week. The format kept Blake current without rebuilding the character every time culture moved.

He keeps finding new homes for the character: Voiceovers, live shows, DJ sets, television appearances, podcasting, golf content, and collaborations all grew from the same comic brain without feeling like forced extensions.

Grik and Carl already proved themselves before the pitch: Georgeson and Brent Pella built the community for the blue aliens online first. We Out Here enters development with Happy Madison after billions of views rather than a deck explaining why people might care.

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A week ago Saturday, an invite-only group of executives, lawyers, agents, producers and technologists gathered at AFI in Los Angeles to discuss the state of AI. The conversation was held under the Chatham House Rule. No cell phones. Ben Affleck was the star attraction.

I wasn’t invited, and neither were you.

That has become a familiar story. Producers and filmmakers are constantly told that AI will disrupt every part of production, but almost nobody can explain what that means in practice.

During Netflix’s second-quarter earnings call, Ted Sarandos said the company had used generative-AI workflows on roughly 300 titles, primarily in postproduction. Doing what? Removing wires? Building crowds? Altering performances? Replacing locations? Netflix offered a few examples, but most of the work remains a black box. My guess is that a lot of it is still dubbing and subtitling.

Placing the bet

There are evangelists who believe generative AI will eventually absorb the entire production process. Then there are filmmakers betting on assisted AI: keeping actors, directors and conventional photography at the center while using the technology to extend, alter or finish what they capture.

Both paths will succeed and fail in interesting and unpredictable ways. But storytellers planning for the next few years cannot wait for the argument to resolve itself. We have to decide where to put our time, money and attention.

I have become increasingly interested in assisted-AI storytelling.

Neither path is harmless to the people who make movies. Fully generated work can replace jobs outright. Assisted AI can shrink crews, eliminate shooting days and move work away from departments that have supported generations of craftspeople. Those are not abstract efficiencies. They are jobs, health insurance and careers.

I don’t have a satisfying answer to that.

But the other side of the equation is real too: if we cannot find efficiencies and keep the business healthy, there will be fewer movies—and fewer jobs—to protect. The survival of the business is part of the labor question.

I also recognize my bias. My business depends on stars, and I believe audiences will continue to care about human presence and human creativity. I have yet to see much exceptional work emerge from generative AI. The results remain rare and usually come with caveats.

The true believers will push back. If the work is good, audiences will care less and less how it was made. Today’s generative-AI content is the worst we will ever see. The tools will make possible things we cannot yet imagine.

All of that may be true. I still believe human creativity is the decisive ingredient—and assisted AI depends on far more of it.

Who is building assisted-AI tools? What can they actually do? And what can the rest of us learn from outside the room?

Affleck vs. Kavanaugh

That is the question I was chasing when I began looking at Ben Affleck’s InterPositive and Ryan Kavanaugh’s Acme AI & FX.

What I admire is that both of them made large, visible bets on AI-assisted filmmaking before the direction of the market was clear. They won’t be the last. But neither has shown us much about how his system actually works.

I wasn’t looking to dismiss either company. I wanted to understand what problem each was trying to solve—and how hard it would be to get there without access to what it had built.

So I reconstructed both systems, or at least as much of them as I could, from the outside. I gathered interviews, presentations and production claims. I read InterPositive’s patents and compared both companies’ descriptions with existing tools for inpainting, relighting, virtual production, markerless capture, previs, digital environments and footage-conditioned generation.

The question was not whether every component was new. It was how the pieces connected, what information moved between them and whether the resulting system could make hundreds of production decisions repeatable.

The investigation produced some answers, although for the sake of brevity I have not gone as deep here as I would have liked. In broad strokes, InterPositive’s patents reveal its training structure, internal models and the costs it was designed to reduce. Acme’s materials describe a recognizable pipeline that can be compared with tools already on the market.

Neither system has been independently tested. InterPositive has never been publicly demonstrated. Acme has not yet proved that a system built for one unusually ambitious movie—seen only through a short, private work-in-progress presentation—can transfer economically to the next.

Affleck and Kavanaugh were never building rival versions of the same system. They started with different ideas about what should remain fixed, where a director needs freedom and when the machine should enter the process.

Affleck: Build the Model Around the Movie

None of the individual things Affleck says InterPositive can do is entirely new. Visual-effects artists already remove wires, reframe shots, alter lighting, enhance backgrounds and create coverage that was never photographed.

If InterPositive were simply a conversational interface placed over familiar tools, it might be useful. But it would not explain why Netflix paid approximately $587 million for a company with fewer than twenty employees.

So what makes it interesting?

A Film School for the Machine

InterPositive’s most valuable asset may be a library of training footage designed to teach a machine how cinematography works.

Affleck’s team built that library on a soundstage using professional cameras, lenses and LiDAR, which uses lasers to measure the position and distance of objects. They photographed the same scenes repeatedly, changing one variable at a time: the lens, aperture, shutter, sensor, focus or color temperature.

Think of it as a film school for the machine.

Keep the actor, lighting and camera position exactly the same but change the lens, and the machine can begin to understand what that lens does to the image. Change only the aperture, and it can learn how depth of field works.

Footage scraped from the internet cannot teach this nearly as cleanly. An 85mm lens often appears in a portrait, while a wide lens often appears in a landscape or action scene. A model trained on random footage may associate the lens with the subject without understanding how the lens itself changes the picture.

InterPositive isolated the variables so the machine could learn cause and effect.

Training Smart, Not Broad

The footage from a single movie could never contain enough information to teach a model everything it needs to know. It may show one actor in one room under one set of conditions, but not that room from every angle or what would happen if the camera, lens and lighting changed.

Large general-purpose models solve that problem by training on enormous quantities of material. That gives them breadth, but it also creates many of the copyright, consent and chain-of-title problems surrounding AI.

InterPositive appears to take a different approach: train smart rather than broad. Its controlled dataset teaches the general rules of lenses, light, cameras and physical space. The dailies then teach the system the specific world of one movie—its actors, sets and visual language.

One dataset teaches the grammar of filmmaking; the other teaches the vocabulary of this particular film.

The patents leave room for InterPositive to use larger models made by other companies. But if its controlled dataset works as intended, the system may rely less on broadly scraped material because it has been taught the information it actually needs.

Jack of All Trades, Master of… Many?

The patents identify two internal models. The first is called SamildAnach, an old name associated with the Irish god Lugh that roughly means skilled in many arts.

SamildAnach looks at ordinary footage and describes how it was photographed. It tries to identify the lens, camera position, depth, distance and composition. Instead of simply labeling an image “a woman in a room,” it describes how the filmmaker created the shot.

A second model, called Filmmaker, uses those descriptions to modify or generate images while following the visual rules learned from the soundstage footage.

InterPositive is not asking a filmmaker to type “give me a car chase in Tokyo” and accept whatever appears. It begins with a movie’s own footage, learns that production’s performers, sets and visual language, and creates new material within those boundaries.

If it produces an insert or camera angle that was never photographed, it is still generating an image. It is simply generating from the movie rather than from a blank prompt.

How a Production Might Use It

The likely workflow is that a production shoots normally and supplies its dailies. InterPositive analyzes that footage and adapts a larger model to the performers, sets, lighting and visual language of that particular movie.

A filmmaker could then reshape material after the shoot—fixing mistakes, testing new creative choices or making changes that once required a reshoot or a much larger visual-effects effort.

The results would still need review, compositing, color and approval. Nothing I found suggests that filmmakers or visual-effects artists disappear. The tool expands what they can change and when they can change it.

InterPositive therefore appears to be more than a wrapper around existing software, but less than an entirely new form of generative AI. Its value lies in teaching existing technology to understand filmmaking and making it usable inside a professional production.

Why Netflix Dropped Big Bills on This

Netflix may have wanted a system built specifically for filmmakers, trained on material with a clean chain of title and capable of fitting into its existing production infrastructure. A general-purpose model might be more powerful. A model that understands how filmmakers work—and whose training material Netflix can account for—may be more useful.

Not to be cynical, but Netflix is a technology company, and technology companies now appear contractually obligated to mention AI in every earnings presentation. After a quarter that failed to excite investors despite strong earnings, InterPositive gave Netflix something new to talk about.

But $587 million is an expensive way to zhuzh up an earnings call.

Kavanaugh: Build the Movie Before You Shoot It

Kavanaugh begins with the same problem as Affleck—movies cost too much and could benefit from new tools—but his solution is almost the reverse. Acme tries to design the movie so completely in advance that the physical shoot becomes the shortest part of the process.

Its test case is Bitcoin: Killing Satoshi, directed by Doug Liman and starring Casey Affleck and Gal Gadot.

Acme says a conventional version would have required seventy-two shooting days across 213 locations in eighteen countries. Instead, the actors were photographed over approximately twenty days on a gray stage in West London, and the locations were built around them later.

Do the Work Before the Actors Arrive

Kavanaugh says he spent approximately $15 million, seven to eight months and the labor of a fifty-person creative team developing the system and planning the movie.

Every shot, camera position and environment was mapped before production began. The company says its software can read a screenplay and help generate storyboards, blocking plans and three-dimensional previews. Another part of the system determines which props must be physically present because the actors need to touch them. A central planning tool connects the shots with cast schedules, crew requirements and production logistics.

The simple version is that Acme turns the screenplay into a detailed set of instructions before anyone starts shooting. It does not eliminate production decisions. It forces filmmakers to make them earlier.

Why a Gray Stage?

Acme shot the actors in a gray room rather than against a traditional green screen.

Green screens make it easier to separate an actor from the background, but they also cast green light onto skin, hair and clothing. Visual-effects artists then have to remove that color, sometimes frame by frame. A gray stage creates less color contamination and provides cleaner footage for relighting and compositing.

The actors still wear real costumes and handle real props. Multiple cameras record their faces and bodies without motion-capture suits or tracking dots. The director and cinematographer can view versions of the digital environments through augmented-reality equipment, while projected marks on the floor show the actors where walls, furniture and other objects will eventually appear.

Acme is not generating the actors. It is capturing their performances and separating those performances from the worlds around them.

Build the World Afterward

Once the actors are photographed, the production moves into what Acme calls its “VFX Soup.” Production designers, cinematographers, costume designers and visual-effects artists continue building the movie together.

The production designer creates the environments. The cinematographer helps match the light on the actors to the light in those environments. Costumes remain physical but must be adjusted to reflect the colors and light of places that never surrounded them on set.

The advantage is that a director can change those places after the actors have gone home. Liman reportedly turned an ordinary restaurant scene into an elaborate venue with circus performers. A phone call originally set at a desk in Antigua moved to an Antarctic snowstorm with wolves in the background.

The company screened a polished ten-minute compilation shortly after the shoot ended. That does not mean the film was finished in two weeks. It means enough work had been completed during preparation for selected scenes to move through postproduction quickly.

What Does It Save?

Acme reports a total budget of approximately $70 million and a below-the-line cost of $40 million, compared with an earlier physical-production estimate of $120 million to $130 million.

I would want to see the comparison budget. No experienced producer would literally travel to 213 locations. They would be combined, substituted or rewritten. The fair comparison is between Acme’s method and the practical version a conventional line producer would actually budget. Maybe a better comparison is what they get for $25 million (which I believe was the BTL minus the 15 million in product development).

Even with that caveat, shooting for twenty-one days in one building obviously saves money on travel, construction, location fees, company moves and physical-production time. That is Kavanaugh’s point as he sells the system.

So What Is Proprietary?

Acme claims a large patent portfolio—more than sixty patents, compared with Affleck’s four—but I could not verify it. The applications may not yet be public because publication can take eighteen months. That does not mean the patents do not exist.

Most of the individual tools Acme describes already exist. Filmmakers can license software for storyboarding, virtual environments, camera tracking, digital relighting and markerless performance capture. Gray stages and augmented-reality previews are not new inventions on their own.

What Acme may own is the system that connects them.

Think of it as an assembly line. Acme may not have invented every machine on the factory floor—although perhaps it did invent some—but it may have developed a better way to move a movie from script to planning, from planning to the gray stage, and from the gray stage into post without losing information along the way.

What Does a Director Give Up?

The price of Acme’s postproduction flexibility is that more decisions must be made before the shoot.

Actors sitting in a planned wide shot can still improvise dialogue. The problem comes when someone unexpectedly runs across the room and the director whips the camera around to follow. The digital environment on that side of the room may not exist because nobody planned to photograph it.

The system can accommodate changes, but rebuilding the environment, tracking and lighting costs money. At some point, preserving unlimited spontaneity begins to consume the savings the system was designed to create.

That makes the method better suited to some genres than others. A controlled drama or international thriller may benefit enormously. A comedy built around physical improvisation may find it harder to use.

And the biggest question: does it use LLMs? Its hard to tell. But that might complicate chain of title. Apparently some of the cost of producing this movie were the lawyers they needed to avoid that very issue. Who knows…

The Cannes Reaction

What buyers actually saw at Cannes remains fuzzy. Reports describe only “first footage,” elsewhere characterized as a ten-minute preview, shown behind closed doors while the film was still deep in postproduction.

Doug Liman called the response “strong,” and trade coverage noted a “steady stream of curious buyers.” Word on the street was reportedly more mixed, with some attendees said to be underwhelmed.

Because no buyers spoke on the record, it is difficult to know what they saw or how representative those reactions were.

The footage apparently generated some territorial sales. Warner Bros.’ Clockwork reportedly entered exclusive talks for North America, although no completed deal was publicly confirmed.

Can Acme Repeat It?

Kavanaugh’s answer is his slate.

Acme says it has more than fifteen film and television projects in development or production, plus advertising work. None of this has been corroborated beyond Kavanaugh’s claims.

He says the buzz, set visits and conversations around Hollywood have brought producers to Acme with movies they cannot fit into budgets that will get greenlit. The pipeline will now include both Acme’s own projects and production services for others.

It is easy to be cynical about a business whose information comes primarily from its founder. But Kavanaugh took the first steps. He developed a script, got it funded and used that money to build a pipeline that could—or ostensibly does—bring costs down.

He is one giant step ahead of most of us.

Two Different Places for Creative Freedom

InterPositive treats the photographed image—and everything within it—as the source of truth, using AI to alter or extend what was shot. Acme treats the performance as the source of truth, building the surrounding world afterward. One targets reshoots, visual effects and finishing; the other targets locations, travel, construction and shooting days.

The eventual answer probably will not be one system or the other. A filmmaker might shoot 40 percent of a movie through Acme’s process, photograph the rest conventionally and run everything through InterPositive.

That is how movies have always been built: combine tools, move money around and preserve what matters creatively. The technology will change. The job remains deciding where the savings are worth the trade.

The Other End of the Market

Let’s be honest.

Most of us do not operate in Affleck’s or Kavanaugh’s orbit. Wherever the money came from, Kavanaugh put together a $70 million film about a man trying to save Bitcoin. A-list talent or not, he can access capital in a way most filmmakers cannot. And even if you make content for Netflix, who knows when—or whether—you will get access to Affleck’s tools.

Hernany Perla offers a view from the other end of the market. He is an old friend. We met when he was an executive at Lionsgate and the company I worked for had a deal there. After leaving the studio, he became expert at something few people know how to do anymore: take a movie from idea to delivery for a few hundred thousand dollars.

Hart’s company recently brought Perla in to help with microdramas but quickly realized his real skill was stretching one dollar into ten, whatever the format. So it asked him to help supervise Exotic Foods, a show being made for Hart’s LOL platform.

The Work Moves

Exotic Foods was the first project Perla observed that ran entirely through a hybrid pipeline: one location standing in for many, with real actors and props inside a world built around them digitally. Its budget was a small fraction of what full live action would have cost. It was a true indie assisted-AI show.

What he learned was that the savings were not where people assumed. They were not in post. They were in prep, paid for with a level of discipline low-budget filmmaking has spent decades learning to live without.

Perla still thinks physically. A table, cart or doorway gives an actor something real to move around. Hair, makeup and costume provide details the eye trusts. The background may be virtual, but the image still needs weight, texture and overlap.

The specific tools matter less than the system around them.

Unreal Engine, already common in production, can build the digital environments. Platforms such as Voia and Beeble help place photographed actors inside those environments by separating, tracking and relighting the live-action footage. Together, they offer pieces of a virtual-production pipeline that once required far more specialized infrastructure.

In the indie world, the producer does not need to own every tool. The job is understanding how they fit together—and where they are likely to fail (and will they work for your budget).

Ambition Leaks Out a Shot at a Time

A low-budget project rarely loses its ambition through one enormous compromise. It happens through dozens of small ones.

For now, that may be where these tools matter most: not replacing the shoot, but intervening in small, controlled ways and solving problems that would otherwise remain in the movie.

Those interventions will grow as the technology improves. Filmmakers will also get better at recognizing where the tools can help. The real skill may not be generating entire worlds. It may be spotting the handful of places where a modest intervention preserves something the budget was about to take away.

Eventually the only restraint will be the filmmaker’s imagination, not the budget.

We are not there yet. But we can start learning where the tools bend, where they break and which compromises they might allow us to stop making.

Who Owns the System?

Perla reached many of the same conclusions as Kavanaugh, only from the other end of the budget scale.

The difference is ownership.

Affleck built an asset Netflix could own. Kavanaugh built a system Acme hopes to repeat. Perla assembles what a particular production needs, then takes it apart when the movie is finished.

Those are different economic models, but they are also different answers to a larger question: How much of filmmaking should become permanent infrastructure?

Maybe the advantage will belong to the companies that own the technology. Maybe it will belong to producers who know how to combine tools without owning them. Or maybe filmmakers will eventually need some version of both—access to the open market and enough proprietary knowledge to avoid becoming customers in someone else’s system.

Still Digging

I do not have a clean answer yet. I am just digging in.

But here is a story to leave you with.

We were finishing a movie when an AI company approached us. We were missing a few inserts, and several sequences could have used shots we did not have. We reviewed them together, and the company was confident it could help. It promised 4K delivery and indemnification against legal claims, cited deals underway with studios, and pointed to other filmmakers already using its tools.

I was skeptical, but curious.

So I negotiated a very affordable deal. I told our post supervisor and my producing partner that we were paying to learn—but that we should keep pursuing the conventional solution, just in case.

Good thing we did.

The latest update is that we cannot color-correct the company’s outputs. If we want an insert of an actor’s hand holding a phone, we first have to color correct and output the footage in 4k, train the system and then generate the insert. The color has to be baked in before the new shot exists. Several other things we needed—including crowd work—turned out to be beyond what the tools could deliver.

This is a well-known company working in assisted AI. Its limitations do not prove that the technology is useless. They reveal the distance between an impressive capability and something that can survive a real postproduction pipeline.

So how far along are we, really?

Affleck has built technology almost nobody outside a small circle has seen. Kavanaugh has a movie in post that buyers encountered only through a closed, work-in-progress presentation.

Exotic Foods, the show Perla supervised, will soon go directly to consumers. It does not have to survive the same scrutiny as a studio feature projected on a forty-foot screen. Most people will watch it on a phone. It can still generate CPMs, attract brand deals and find an audience. Will those viewers care how the backgrounds were created?

These projects are different and deserve different scrutiny. That may be the point. “Ready” is not a single threshold. A tool can be ready for one format, budget and screen while remaining unusable for another.

Adoption will not happen evenly either. Different countries, platforms and production cultures will balance labor, regulation, cost and quality in different ways. Some may move faster precisely because they are willing to tolerate results that Hollywood cannot—or will not—accept.

The messier tools may reach audiences before the precise ones do.

I am talking to artists and technical experts. I am weighing whether my company should build something of its own—not because I know what it should be, but because ownership may be the price of a seat at the table.

Tomorrow, the tools will change again.

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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 quietly redefining what it means to make, and watch, scripted content in the mobile age.

We’re doing things a little differently this week.

There has been a lot of good reporting recently about where these worlds are heading, and rather than summarize all of it into oblivion, we thought we’d point you toward the stories we think are worth your time, along with a few thoughts on why.

Consider this your Vertical Bloom reading list.

But first…

Do you feel that?

The gates are opening.

I think the namesake of Open Gardens, where The Vertical Bloom makes its home, is one of the best names Ben Odell could have chosen for this moment.

It speaks to something that has always been one of the best parts of this digital home, this vertical world, this creator economy: the gates have always been a little more open here.

When I worked at MrBeast, I was struck by the prevailing belief that a 17-year-old from Indiana might have just as much value to bring to the room as a seasoned producer from Los Angeles.

When it’s productive in a meeting, I’ll bring up the fact that legacy entertainment does not have the same expansive momentum that digital possesses. I honestly believe that it could. Maybe even that it should.

But it’s also true that wisdom’s a gift and you trade it for youth. That age is an honor, but it’s still not the truth. (Thanks, Ezra Koenig.)

When I think about my experiences in the creator economy, and the members of my team who keep me honest, I’m grateful I’ve been taught to keep an open mind. And I’m grateful Larry King’s words still rattle around in my head, in his booming, breaking baritone:

“Don’t knock the new.”

I sometimes fear that entertainment instills an unfortunate necessity in people: the feeling that you must always appear to know exactly what you’re doing.

And if you have to appear to already know, it becomes very difficult to admit that someone new might know something you don’t.

Thankfully, not everyone succumbs to that.

Every month there are more meetings on my calendar with people from companies that film-school-me dreamed of meeting. Stops on studio lots with showrunners with housekeeping deals, looking at the future and yearning for clarity.

The gates are opening.

And there are so many wonderful people on the other side with so much to share. Knowledge about taste, business acumen, and what is ultimately an incredibly well-guarded, mostly oral tradition: The accumulated knowledge of Hollywood.

We are about to see a lot of eyebrow-raising deals announced across the vertical world and beyond.

The gates are opening.

But what happens once we’re all inside?

There’s a quote I first read printed next to the spiral binding of one of my school notebooks, presumably placed there by some Scholastic employee trying to make a deadline, that has stuck with me ever since. It was attributed to Mark Twain, and apparently there’s actually quite a bit of debate if he actually said it, but it’s a truth for me nonetheless:

“Keep away from those who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that. Only the truly great make you feel that you, too, can become great.”

The spirit of that quote is part of why I think digital has such expansive momentum.

We seek to raise each other. We don’t mind when others iterate on our work. We give wisdom freely. And if my experiences have taught me anything, it’s that all ships do indeed rise in the tide.

The gates are opening, and a lot of talented people are going to find themselves staring at each other inside a strange and wonderful world, wondering what to do.

And the answer will always be:

Create.

Courageously.

Together.

Alright, let’s get into it.

What We’re Reading

A $150 Billion Vertical Video Economy. With an Important Asterisk.

Deadline on Owl & Co.’s latest research into the vertical video economy

There’s a big number making the rounds: $150 billion.

Owl & Co. estimates that the global vertical-video economy outside China will generate roughly $150 billion in revenue in 2026, up more than 40% year over year.

But there’s an important distinction: that number represents the entire vertical-video ecosystem, not microdrama alone. Dedicated microdrama apps account for roughly $4 billion of the estimate. If you’d like to hear more about why Owl & Co. are including all verticals in this number, I would encourage you to check out our review of their summit a few months ago.

The research gets even more interesting beyond the headline number. On My Drama, men have grown from just 1.1% of monthly users to more than 30% in seven quarters, while heavy viewers now average 13.1 hours of viewing per week.

Read the Deadline piece here.

DramaBox Is Going Local in Latin America

Deadline: “DramaBox Sets Brazilian Vertical Series From Cimarron & Trio Of Colombian Originals In Latin American Push”

DramaBox is expanding its original production footprint in Latin America, including a Brazilian series with regional production company Cimarrón and three Colombian originals.

As vertical platforms expand globally, localization doesn’t have to mean translating an American series or dubbing an existing hit. Increasingly, it can mean working with established local producers and talent to build stories for those audiences from the beginning.

Read the Deadline story here.

Microdrama May Be One of the Few Parts of Hollywood That’s Growing

Reuters: “Microdramas boom in a shrinking Hollywood as studios chase a TikTok audience”

This one deserves your time.

Reuters took a much broader look at what the growth of microdrama is actually doing to the Hollywood production ecosystem, including the jobs, facilities, investment and new career paths forming around it while much of traditional production remains under pressure.

Research firm Omdia estimates U.S. microdrama revenue will reach $1.5 billion this year and nearly $2 billion next year, while the U.S. monthly audience more than doubled from 26 million in 2024 to 66 million last year.

There is a much bigger conversation here about what vertical production could mean for Hollywood itself, and we don’t want to cram it into three paragraphs.

So for now: read this. We’ll be coming back to it with some deeper thoughts soon.

Read the Reuters story here.

YouTube and Netflix Are Starting to Fight Over Creators

Bloomberg: “YouTube Offers Creators Millions to Not Work With Netflix”

Bloomberg reports that YouTube is discussing multimillion-dollar incentives with major creators in exchange for giving YouTube a period of exclusivity before their programming appears elsewhere, as Netflix continues courting YouTube talent.

Those incentives could include direct financing for programming and participation in major brand deals. At the time of Bloomberg’s reporting, no deals had been finalized.

For years, the creator economy story was largely about creators trying to cross over into Hollywood. Now two of the biggest video platforms in the world may be bidding against each other to keep them.

Read Lucas Shaw’s Bloomberg report here.

WEBTOON Turns Proven Digital IP Into Vertical Video

Variety: “Webtoon Entertainment Dives into Vertical Shorts, Setting ‘Love Bites’ and ‘Maybe Meant to Be’ as Microdramas”

WEBTOON has launched six live-action vertical adaptations of existing webcomics.

That combination is fascinating: digitally proven IP + an existing fandom + vertical adaptation + an existing digital monetization system.

It raises a much bigger question about whether the most natural source material for the next generation of vertical hits may already be sitting inside other digital storytelling ecosystems.

Again, we think there’s enough here for a much bigger conversation. Read the Variety piece now but expect us to be coming back to these ideas in a future Bloom.

Read the Variety story here.

The Sidemen Are Helping Train the Next Generation of Producers

Deadline: “The Sidemen & NFTS Team To Train Next Generation Of Unscripted Producers In UK”

Sidemen Entertainment is partnering with the UK’s National Film and Television School to give students studying unscripted development and production direct experience inside a creator-led entertainment company.

This isn’t just traditional producers going to work for creator companies, or creators being taught how television works. One of the UK’s most established film and television schools is now putting future producers inside a creator-led company as part of their education.

I love this one because it’s such a tangible example of The Great Convergence we always talk about.

Read the Deadline story here.

Sony Wants Someone Who Speaks YouTube

Natalie Jarvey’s Like & Subscribe: “Sony Hiring a $500K YouTube Whisperer”

First, a quick plug: we’re big fans of Natalie Jarvey around here.

If you work anywhere near the creator economy, Like & Subscribe should be in your reading rotation. Natalie consistently surfaces the specific deals, hires and business moves that tell you where this industry is heading, often before they turn into much bigger conversations.

Her latest has a particularly fun one: Sony Pictures is looking for an executive to help the studio better understand and operate on YouTube, with compensation that can reach $500,000.

The same edition also includes scoops on First We Feast building new vertical shows for Instagram and TikTok and Oscar winner Travon Free producing an independent scripted series with YouTube as a potential distribution path.

We’ve written a lot here about Hollywood and the creator economy learning to speak each other’s languages and apparently speaking YouTube is now a half-a-million-dollar skill.

Read Natalie’s full edition of Like & Subscribe here. And while you’re there, subscribe.

The Mole Distributor Is Moving Into Microdrama

Broadcast: “The Mole distributor Primitives moves into microdrama”

Primitives, the international formats distributor behind The Mole and 99 to Beat, is moving into microdrama.

Traditional format distributors entering the market suggests another piece of the established television ecosystem is starting to see vertical not simply as content, but as IP that can be developed, packaged, sold and adapted internationally.

Read the Broadcast story here.

Cuisinart Is Making a Sitcom for Your Feed

Marketing Dive: “Cuisinart caters to thumb-scrolling consumers with short-form series”

Cuisinart has launched its first episodic campaign built specifically for social: a 14-part comedy about a modern home cook whose roommate happens to be a starving artist transported from the Baroque period.

The episodes were designed for TikTok, Instagram and YouTube Shorts, and importantly, they’re non-linear so viewers can encounter them through an algorithmic feed without needing to start at episode one.

Rather than chopping a traditional campaign into vertical assets, Cuisinart started with the behavior of the audience and built the format around it.

Worth a read if you’re interested in where branded entertainment is heading.

Read the Marketing Dive story here.

That’s it for this week.

Nine stories, several different corners of the industry, and one fairly consistent theme: the boundaries between vertical, creator-led entertainment and the traditional entertainment business are getting harder and harder to find.

And if a few of these stories sound like they deserve an entire Bloom of their own…

We agree.

See you next week.

Editor: Scott Brown

Writer: Franziska Harms