Short Drama in 2026: AI Replaces Live-Action Crews and the Overseas Short Drama Ecosystem Is Reshuffled

In June of this year, Mandy moved from Atlanta to Los Angeles. Her rent rose from $1,800 to $2,600 a month, and her identity changed too: she became an independent short-drama director.

The reason for the move was simple: there were too few opportunities in Atlanta.

At the end of 2023, a classmate from film school invited her to start a business together, working as a producer on a project basis in collaboration with the other person's production company. At that time, short dramas were still very new in the United States; producers were almost all Asian, and only a small number of crew members were American. Back then, both her work and her life were in a state of "just right."

"I was studying in Atlanta. This is a film and television industry base that has emerged in North America in recent years, attracting a large number of production crews to come and shoot, so I stayed after graduation. However, for people doing creative work, there actually aren't many opportunities here."

Starting in May and June of this year, job opportunities in the industry suddenly shrank. Mandy's most direct impression was this: in early May, the clients, platform parties, and short-drama companies she had been in contact with were still hiring and expanding; around June, almost all of these actions were halted.

According to the DataEye Research Institute, Jiuzhou Culture's AI dramas and animated dramas already account for 95% of the company's total production capacity, with 1,399 new dramas produced and broadcast in a single month in March 2026; Kunlun Wanwei Tiangong AI's AI Native business had ARR of more than $800 million in Q2 2026, of which the AI short-drama platform accounted for more than $700 million, and more than 80% of new content on its short-drama platform DramaWave is generated by AI.

Cecilia, head of the US Crazy Stone Film and Television, mentioned that after Q2 2026, overseas live-action short-drama shooting projects shrank by at least 30% to 50% year on year.

Short-drama actress Blake Manning told Business Insider that in April she received an invitation to shoot a short drama, but was subsequently notified, "You've been replaced by AI." Another short-drama star, Rebecca Berg, perceived an even greater change: previously she could receive twenty or thirty audition calls a week, but after early June that number dropped to single digits.

Considering cost and efficiency, this shift was almost inevitable.

Wang Wenjin, founder of Haoli Media, once revealed that in 2023 her first short drama cost $110,000 to produce. By January 2025, the shooting cost was close to $200,000.

Mandy told us that in recent years, the wages of overseas short-drama crew members have not actually risen significantly; the core cost growth lies in actors' salaries. This year, the highest salary she encountered for an actor was $3,000 a day, far exceeding the industry's general standard of $1,000 a day; another producer, Linda, told us that an actress who earned $800 a day in 2023 saw her value rise to $1,500 by mid-2025.

Actress Vanessa von Schwarz, who became famous for appearing in short dramas

In North America, actors' working hours are also subject to certain protections. Although some projects are not affiliated with a union, adult actors basically comply with the rules of "no more than 12 hours a day, and an interval of more than 12 hours from wrapping on one day to starting work the next day." Under these rules, the longest short drama Mandy shot took 13 days, and the shortest took 6 days.

Multiple industry practitioners revealed that the shooting cost of an overseas live-action short drama is about $150,000, but the cost of an AI short drama may be only one-tenth of that figure.

In the three months since coming to Los Angeles, Mandy has taken on two projects. The daily rate is slightly higher than before, but the number of projects is only half of what it used to be, and she has to pay 23% to 30% in taxes herself. "But some work expenses can be deducted from taxes, such as gas money for driving to the set."

Although there aren't many projects, Mandy does not regret coming to Los Angeles. "Right now it may just be a turning point. But if I had stayed in Atlanta, I would only get even fewer jobs."

Actually, that's not the case either.

In July and August of this year, the industry experienced an earthquake, caused by a change in TikTok's short-drama revenue-sharing coefficient.

Data shows that in August, TikTok's domestic drama monthly revenue share exceeded $24 million, and domestic AI dramas grew 55%, with revenue sharing hitting a new high. But the fact is that many practitioners found their take-home amounts plummeting, posted their bills in various groups and on social platforms, and began a series of discussions about "direct affiliates, collateral affiliates, and outside affiliates."

Deng Chengye, CEO of the AI overseas short-drama production company Qiyun Workshop, gave a range: "At the very beginning it was about $30 per ten thousand views, and then it suddenly dropped to a few dollars per ten thousand views. The cliff-like drop in the coefficient affected many of the first wave of companies doing AI short dramas overseas."

Another entrepreneur was even more helpless about this. "The lies woven by TikTok have made everyone deeply question this industry."

Not only that, competition within the track is also intensifying.

This year, when Deng Chengye participated in a project bid for a certain platform, he faced as many as six competitors. This DND (Dungeons & Dragons) project not only required the entire bid presentation to be in English — the director needed to explain their understanding of the plot, art style, and subsequent production content, and on that basis fully communicate with other production teams and the platform's own director team; it also required producing a demo within three days.

Who has occupied the new ecological niche?

The most numerous people in the industry are still blind followers. After communicating with several practitioners, this is the conclusion everyone reached unanimously.

But the fact is that blind followers crowd inside the threshold, while serious players build their own roads outside it. The biggest misunderstanding in this industry is treating "easy to enter" as "easy to make money."

The first cohort is Chinese teams, and they are growing new industrial clusters domestically. Just as live-action short dramas reshaped the entertainment map, in addition to Zhengzhou, Ningbo, and Xi'an, which rose during the short-drama era, practitioners say AI short dramas have also given rise to a new "Four Little Dragons": Hangzhou, Chongqing, Nanchang, and Wuhan. Scriptwriting may lean more toward Hangzhou and Chongqing, while production may lean more toward Zhengzhou, Nanchang, Chongqing, and Wuhan. "Wuhan especially, because the Wuhan Animation Institute naturally provides local talent."

Beyond Chinese teams, two other forces occupy the overseas ecological niches: mature transformation teams born in overseas local markets, and entrepreneurs who grew up in the AI-native era. "Now, apart from Chinese teams, the ones doing AI short dramas best are the Americans," Deng Chengye told Xiaguang Society.

Among the more mature transformation teams, the digital publishing platform Inkitt is quite representative. Founded in Berlin, Germany, in 2013, the company now has offices in Berlin and San Francisco. Its short-drama streaming app CandyJar claims that AI can reduce production costs by 99%; its sister company Ironblood specializes in action-oriented AI short dramas aimed at male audiences, inviting live-action actors to participate in micro-expression training, completing a work in three to four weeks at a cost of less than $60,000.

According to the DataEye Research Institute's report for the first half of 2026, CandyJarTV entered the TOP 20 overseas micro-short dramas by in-app purchase revenue, one of four overseas local apps on the list; the other three are Ukraine's My Drama, South Korea's Vigloo, and Israel's Shortical.

Entrepreneurs who grew up in the AI-native era are represented by Cecilia Shen, a former Google engineer who founded Utopai Studios, "the world's largest independent AI-native film and television studio," at just 25. Utopai Studios' official website prominently states: Next-generation studio. Human-directed. AI-powered.

Screenshot of the Utopai Studios official website

Utopai Studios takes a high-profile, high-investment approach: it appeared on the opening main stage of the Cannes MIPCOM, and collaborated with Oscar-nominated Antonio Banderas. According to Forbes, the company's valuation has reached $1 billion—the highest valuation to date for a purely artificial intelligence film and television studio in independent reporting.

This is enough to show that with overseas local forces and international giants entering the fray, the global short-drama market is bidding farewell to the situation where Chinese companies dominated alone and entering a "Warring States era" of contending rivals.

One of the earliest surviving werewolf stories appears in The Epic of Gilgamesh: the goddess Ishtar turns a shepherd into a wolf. In ancient Greece, Herodotus also recounted in The Histories the legend that the Neuri transform into wolves every year, though he himself did not believe it. Entering the early modern period, from the late fifteenth century to the seventeenth century, werewolf legends in parts of Europe became intertwined with witchcraft trials; some people were tried for allegedly conspiring with the devil and taking the form of wolves, and some were executed.

Initially, film and television works often tied the werewolf theme to thrillers, but in 2008 the fantasy film Twilight grossed $393 million worldwide and went on to release four more films over the following four years, reaping $3.3 billion at the box office. Its reshaping and re-enchantment of werewolves began to make screen creators frequently tie werewolves to romantic love, making it one of the important themes.

Poster for the film Twilight

While naturally drawing attention, this kind of fantasy content is also the hardest to produce.

Deng Chengye told Xiaguang Society that earlier in the year, when they were producing a certain scene for a werewolf-themed short drama, they rolled the gacha more than 20 times.

In October, the head of an AI short-drama production company publicly did the math: for 720p video, the model charges 1.5–1.6 yuan per second, which is 90 yuan per minute. At the normal rate of rolling the gacha three times for the same shot, the compute cost is nearly 300 yuan per minute. That is to say, earlier in the year, producing a werewolf-themed AI overseas short drama would certainly have cost even more.

Chinese Online even disclosed at its Beijing offline roadshow and online conference call held on June 3 that "among all domestic Token consumption, AI short dramas and video generation rank first, accounting for as much as 55%." Chinese Online also said that the high share of Token consumption by AI short dramas and video generation is because, after the emergence of AI simulated-live-action short dramas, Token consumption further increased compared with forms such as comic dramas, and the production process requires continuously generating shots by "rolling the gacha" to screen out the most ideal results, thus continuously generating consumption.

In addition, the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology's "Token Economy Development Research Report (2026)," released on September 30, also used data consistent with Chinese Online, stating that AI short dramas account for 55% of token consumption across the entire industry.

"Although technological progress and the accumulation of materials have improved accuracy, even now some light sources, especially natural-light scenes, are still difficult to handle," Deng Chengye admitted candidly.

From a cultural-background perspective, vampires, the sibling theme of werewolves, also carry the genes to become a breakout hit. But in the boom of the past year, no true breakout hit in that theme has emerged.

In terms of views and payments, Latin America has been the best-performing region in the past year.

Specifically, three structural forces are driving the vigorous development of Latin America's short-drama market:

First, Latin America is one of the regions with the highest smartphone penetration in the world: GSMA predicts that smartphone penetration in Latin America is already close to 80%, while fixed broadband remains limited in many areas. Mobile phones are the primary device for going online and watching content, making the region naturally suited to the popularity of a content format like short dramas.

Second, ever since television became widespread in Latin America in the 1950s, TV series have become the most familiar companion for local audiences. They have shaped regional identity, weaving love, conflict, and social issues into everyday viewing habits. Unlike Western soap operas, which drag on slowly for years, Latin American TV series usually complete a full, dramatic story arc within just over a hundred episodes, complete with forbidden love, hidden identities, and dramatic reconciliations—none of it missing. They are not just entertainment; they are a shared language.

The popularity of TV dramas in Latin America is closely tied to the Familismo (familism) prevalent in Latin American culture. As British scholars of cultural studies and media studies noted in the book Family Television, television was originally a family ritual medium at the center of the living room, watched together by the whole family; its premise for existence was the nuclear family as a unified unit and fixed shared family time.

Brazil's nationally popular hit drama Avenida Brasil, which premiered in 2012

In Latin America, kinship networks are tight and the overall degree of social atomization is lower than in Europe and the United States, so the disintegration of family media has followed a different rhythm. According to a 2023 study by the Latin American Media Research Institute, 83% of surveyed viewers consider TV series "part of family life," and 65% discuss plot twists at the dinner table or during breaks at work. Latin American audiences' intense pursuit of strong conflict and dramatic tension has, in the mobile internet era, also migrated to a more compact content format: short dramas.

Third, Latin America's middle class is steadily growing, driving demand for short-video streaming. They have both disposable income and smartphones, making them the demographic base for the short-drama "pay-to-unlock" model. Vertical short dramas cost about $0.30 to $0.50 per episode to unlock, which is not a heavy burden for middle-class families in Brazil and Mexico.

It is worth noting that the audience for overseas short dramas is not limited to the so-called lower-tier market. In April 2026, a consumer survey conducted by research firm Omdia in the United States, Brazil, Germany, and South Korea showed that in Brazil, Germany, and South Korea, iPhone users were significantly more willing to pay for micro-drama content than Android users.

69% of iPhone users and 68% of Android users said they watch short dramas through subscriptions, one-time purchases, or in-app payments; in some markets, iPhone users are more likely to pay for micro-dramas, which breaks the industry's stereotypes about the audience.

The potential of Latin America's short-drama market has also attracted a stream of Chinese short-drama platforms expanding overseas.

PineDrama, incubated from TikTok's business, launched in the United States, Latin America, Indonesia, and other places at the end of 2025, offering short dramas to users for free, with content mainly consisting of "overseas local productions."

Local productions are made by overseas teams in local languages and require no translation; the other route is "translated dramas," meaning Chinese short dramas are translated and exported. The two paths also diverge: local productions mostly adopt a paid viewing model in Europe and the United States, while translated dramas flow in large numbers to Southeast Asia.

On October 14, estimates released by overseas mobile data research firm Sensor Tower showed that PineDrama's downloads had exceeded 100 million, with about 7 million daily active users, less than a year after launch.

Besides PineDrama, other leading platforms are also stepping up their presence in Latin America: ReelShort is co-producing Spanish-language originals with Colombia's Caracol TV and launching locally produced series in Argentina; DramaBox has also started local production in Mexico, Colombia, and Brazil, though initially focused mainly on adapting existing scripts.

Not only Chinese overseas platforms—Latin American traditional media groups also concentrated on launching vertical-screen content platforms in 2025 and 2026: for example, GloboPop launched by Brazil's Globo, ViX MicrO launched by TelevisaUnivision, the world's largest Spanish-language media company, and MegaShorts under Chile's television station Mega.

In addition, emerging short-drama startup teams in the Latin American cultural region are a growing force: platforms such as Shorta, Latin America's first original vertical-screen series platform; Idilio TV, founded in 2025 and led by a16z Speedrun; and TeleReels, tailored specifically for Hispanic and Latino audiences, are emerging one after another.

In this wave, Chinese entrepreneurs are also important participants. TeleReels is a typical short-drama team built by a Chinese entrepreneurial team: CEO Leky Lin was born in China, grew up in Argentina, and was educated in the United States; he is an award-winning producer with more than a decade of experience in international film and television and media management. COO Moon Zhang is a veteran screenwriter responsible for content IP acquisition and planning; CTO Samuel Zhang has served as an engineering lead at consumer platform companies such as Airbnb and Microsoft.

Conclusion

On the other side of the AI boom, Mandy's friends are trying to "escape" the industry: some have gone into advertising, and some have started making independent films.

Recently, some success stories in independent film have indeed emerged in North America. For example, the true-crime documentary You Can See Everything, made in secret over three years, uses 174 minutes to tell the story of the 34 days before Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes, central figure in a famous Silicon Valley fraud case, entered prison, as well as her life after imprisonment. The film received rave reviews after a "mystery surprise screening" at the Telluride Film Festival, and it is said that Holmes and her husband personally invited the American independent film company A24 to make it.

As for the future, Mandy said she wants to do well what can be done right now. "The industry is changing too fast. In two years, we've watched short dramas rise in glory, host their banquets, and see their towers fall. Everyone in the industry is still feeling their way forward now; there is no clear conclusion."

From the mass suspension of live-action crews to the revenue-sharing shock in AI short dramas; from the migration of Los Angeles directors to new teams growing up in Wuhan's animation schools—AI short-drama going global in 2026 is like a fast-forwarded industry documentary: some see an opportunity, some see a bubble, some turn and walk away, and some are still striving inside the bubble.

This article comes from the WeChat public account "Xiaguang She" (ID: Globalinsights), author: Wuta, published by 36Kr with authorization.