Low brow and vulgar? Micro dramas shake up China's film industry, aim for Hollywood

Actor Zhu Jian, 69, rehearses with other actors on the set of a micro movie during a filming session at a banquet hall, in Zhengzhou, Henan province, China, on July 16, 2024.ZHENGZHOU, China - On a film set that resembles the medieval castle of a Chinese lord, Zhu Jian is busy disrupting the world's second-largest movie industry.

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

Kuaishou vice president Chen Yiyi said at a media conference in January that the app featured 68 titles that notched more than 300 million views last year, with four of them watched over a billion times. Alongside other major Chinese social media apps like Instagram-like Xiaohongshu and YouTube competitor Bilibili, it has announced plans to make more.

The micro dramas often "show people who one day are lower class and the next day become upper class - you get so rich that you get to humiliate those who used to humiliate you," said a 26-year-old screenwriter known by her pen name of Camille Rao. In the US market, by contrast, fantasy stories about werewolves and vampires are particularly popular, several creators told Reuters.Between late 2022 and early 2023, the National Radio and Television Administration regulator said it organised a "special rectification campaign" during which it removed 25,300 micro dramas, totalling close to 1.4 million episodes, due to their "pornographic, bloody, violent, low-brow and vulgar content.

"The plot of these micro dramas is exaggerated," said Zhu, the actor. "It has plot reversals, it's nonsensical, so it catches people's attention and a large audience wants to see them." The show was shot in just six days, and Zhu, a muscular man with a wide smile and boundless energy, says he plays table tennis after hours to keep up with the young crew on set.

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