Domestic AI comic dramas accelerate overseas expansion, with overseas active users exceeding 150 million

Since the beginning of this year, AI technology has accelerated the development of the comic drama industry, and recently domestic comic dramas have gained favor in overseas markets, becoming a new growth pole for the industry. 100 titles launched per day: domestic AI comic dramas accelerate their going global. At an AI comic drama production company in Hangzhou, Zhejiang, operations head Dai Yizhou is discussing storyboard details with production staff. He introduced that through AI-assisted creation, the team can quickly transform traditional literary IP into visual language that suits the aesthetic habits of overseas audiences, which not only lowers production costs but also enables Chinese stories to reach the international stage in a more lightweight and more tech-infused way. Company founder Yi Fengping said that from the first half of the year to now, the growth of short dramas going overseas has been particularly fast, with 100 titles able to be launched per day, mainly exported to Southeast Asia and also extending to European and American markets. By the end of this year, the company's revenue may reach several tens of millions of yuan. The overseas AI comic drama market is expected to exceed 4 billion US dollars. At a company in Shanghai, founder Sun Hao is discussing the new season's overseas distribution schedule with the team. This company, which started out as an animation production contractor, has now shifted its focus to the global distribution of AI comic dramas, with overseas business accounting for 70 percent. This change occurred in just half a year: in the first half of the year, the company's domestic business accounted for about 90 percent, and now it has dropped to 30 percent, while overseas business has risen to 70 percent. The gap in returns is even more intuitive: domestic short dramas earn one yuan to several tens of yuan per 10,000 views, while overseas ones earn 1 US dollar to 10 US dollars, with overall returns higher than domestic. The market is sending the same signal. Institutions predict that in 2026 the overseas micro-short drama market is expected to reach 6 billion US dollars, of which AI comic dramas are expected to exceed 4 billion US dollars, an increase of about 390 percent compared with 2025, with Chinese manufacturers holding a market share of more than 90 percent. Industry insiders said this growth is inseparable from the rapid iteration of domestic large models in areas such as video generation, speech synthesis and multilingual translation. The lowest cost per minute is 350 yuan, and the production cycle of one drama is only 10 days. What supports the cost decline is intensive iteration on the technology side. Chen Weiyu, head of AI technology at China Literature Group, introduced that there are now agents for scripts, agents for styling, and agents for storyboards, which can absorb directors' historical experience and turn it into the agent's own capabilities, and also have planning and reflection capabilities. Moving to the visuals, Zhang Yuxiang, head of ecosystem cooperation at Yanyu Technology, introduced that at the beginning there is a style reference image, the system provides several styles for selection, and the selected image is further extended into different character designs, each matched with corresponding prompts to generate specific video storyboards. The main logic of AI comic dramas is to generate images from text, and then generate videos from images. But AI comic dramas going overseas have very high requirements for character consistency and shot continuity, and often require repeated AI generation to obtain satisfactory images, so creation platforms therefore need to continuously launch new features to save computing power costs for enterprises. In Zhang Yuxiang's view, creation platforms have changed from generating around a single vertical field in the past to more comprehensive, one-stop AI image creation platforms. Costs then show up on the books. Data shows that at present the lowest production cost per minute of domestic AI comic dramas can reach 350 yuan, and the production cycle of one comic drama has been compressed from the original 90 days to about 10 days now; the cost of AI translation and production per title has dropped to 300 yuan to 500 yuan, more than 80 percent lower than the cost of manual translation and production. Among the top ten paid overseas short drama applications, Chinese manufacturers occupy nine seats. At the same time, the channel side is also advancing in parallel. Many enterprises have begun building overseas video platforms to directly reach audiences. At present, about 10 Chinese enterprises have established overseas short drama platforms, and more than ten short drama apps going overseas have launched dedicated channels for AI comic dramas. The overall number of active users of AI comic dramas in overseas markets has exceeded 150 million, and among the top ten paid overseas short drama applications, Chinese manufacturers occupy nine seats. AI-generated images, AI multilingual translation and production, and self-built overseas platforms advancing in parallel. Domestic AI comic dramas going overseas are moving from "translation and transport" toward "localized intelligent manufacturing".