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 69-year-old actor is playing the patriarch of a wealthy family celebrating his birthday with a lavish banquet. But unbeknownst to either of them, the servant in the scene is his biological granddaughter.
A second twist: Zhu is not filming for cinema screens.
Grandma's Moon is a micro drama, composed of vertically shot, minute-long episodes featuring frequent plot turns designed to keep millions of viewers hooked to their cellphone screens - and paying for more.
"They don't go to the cinema anymore," said Zhu of his audience, which he described as largely composed of middle-aged workers and pensioners. "It's so convenient to hold a mobile phone and watch something anytime you want."
China's $5 billion a year micro drama industry is booming, according to Reuters' interviews with 10 people in the sector and four scholars and media analysts.
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.
Three major China-backed micro-drama apps were downloaded 30 million times across both Apple's App Store and Google Play in the first quarter of 2024, grossing $71 million internationally, according to analytics company Appfigures.
"The audience only has that much attention. So obviously, the more time they spend in short videos, the less time they have for TV or other longer format shows," said Ashley Dudarenok, founder of a Hong Kong-based marketing consultancy.
The leader in the space is Kuaishou, an app that accounted for 60% of the top 50 Chinese micro dramas last year, according to media analytics consultancy Endata.
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.
Some 94 million people - more than the population of Germany - watched more than 10 episodes a day on Kuaishou, she said. Reuters was not able to independently verify the data.
Initial episodes on such apps are often free, but to complete a micro drama like Grandma's Moon, which has 64 clips, audiences may pay tens of yuan.
Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok which is owned by internet technology firm Bytedance, is also popular with micro drama fans.
Alongside other major Chinese social media apps like Instagram-like Xiaohongshu and YouTube competitor Bilibili , it has announced plans to make more.
In the United States, micro drama platform ReelShort, whose parent company is backed by Chinese tech giants Tencent and Baidu, has recently outranked Netflix in terms of downloads on Apple's US app store, according to market researcher Sensor Tower.
"China discovered this audience first," said Layla Cao, a Chinese producer based in Los Angeles. "Hollywood hasn't realised that yet, but all the China-based companies are already feeding the content."
'Low brow and vulgar'
Many popular micro dramas, including Grandma's Moon, have narratives that revolve around revenge or Cinderella-like rags-to-riches journeys.
Tales of how circumstances at birth are deterministic and can only be changed by near-miracles have struck a chord with viewers at a time when upward mobility in China is low and youth unemployment high.
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.
Rao recently left her poorly paid job as a junior producer in the traditional film industry for what she described as the more dynamic and less hierarchical world of micro dramas. She now writes and adapts scripts for the US market.
"Social mobility is actually very difficult now. Many people perceive this as a social reality," said Xu Ting, associate professor of Chinese language and literature at Jiangnan University.
This has fuelled interest in stories about billionaires and wealthy families, she added: "Everyone desires power and wealth, so it is normal for these type of stories to be popular."
In the US market, by contrast, fantasy stories about werewolves and vampires are particularly popular, several creators told Reuters.
The boom in micro dramas in China has brought scrutiny from the Communist Party.
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."
As Chinese leader Xi Jinping promotes values such as loyalty to the Communist Party and heteronormative marriages, the state-owned China Women's News outlet in April complained that some micro dramas "portray unequal and twisted marriage and family relationships as a common phenomenon" and "deviate from mainstream social values."
In June, the government began requiring some creators to register micro dramas with NRTA. The regulator didn't respond to Reuters' questions for this story.
Key to the commercial success of these films are plot twists that keep people paying as they scroll while commuting or in line at a grocery store. Episodes often end with a hook - such as a boyfriend walking in on his partner with another man - and viewers have to pay for the next episode to find out what happened.
"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."
Zhu is a lover of cinema and an avid fan of Ingrid Bergman in Casablanca. Like many of his colleagues in micro dramas, he thinks the genre has limited artistic value. "I see it as fast food: a longer drama is a kind of sumptuous meal, and a micro drama is fast food."
But its dedicated viewers disagree. Huang Siyi, a 28-year-old customer service agent, said she enjoyed watching romantic micro dramas because "the acting is good and the male and female leads are good-looking."
"It's easy to be obsessed with micro dramas," she said.
Explosive growth
Vertical filming and distribution through social media apps mean micro dramas can be made with small overhead costs. Budgets for such films range from between $28,000 (200,000 yuan) and $280,000 (2 million yuan), according to market researcher iResearch.
In the central Chinese city of Zhengzhou, Grandma's Moon is being made with a compressed budget and timeline. When Reuters visited the set in July, the filming day stretched until 2 am. The crew then moved to a new location and began shooting again at 7 am.
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.
"We'd need to take two to three years to distribute one traditional TV series of film, but we only need three months to distribute a micro drama, saving us a lot of time," said Zhou Yi, a showrunner at Chinese gaming giant NetEase, which also makes micro dramas.
As micro dramas gain in popularity, actors' salaries have also grown. Leading roles used to pay $280 a day, said Zhu, adding that main actors in big productions can now make more than double the rate, though extras earn as little as $17 daily.
A retired railway employee who started acting in the 1970s in a theatre troupe attached to the unit where he worked, Zhu now lives off his pension and occasional acting gigs.
Many Chinese micro drama producers have their eye on Western markets, where cultural exports from China have often struggled. NetEase last year started making productions for the US that it distributes via an app called LoveShots; the made-for-export films aren't typically available in China.
Micro dramas designed for the West are often made by production and acting crews in Los Angeles and shot on location. The scripts, which are in English, may also revolve around themes of wealth, cheating partners and miracles.
One of the latest micro dramas on LoveShots is about a woman who, after years of being paralysed, miraculously regains her ability to move - and walks in on her husband cheating on her.