DATA
ReelShort lands five of Owl & Co’s weekly top 10 with 119 million views; AI-generated ‘Genie’ leads at 43 million
ReelShort’s The Great and Powerful Genie was the most-watched paid microdrama for the week of Sept. 7–13, with 43 million views. The ranking comes from consulting firm Owl & Co’s Vertical Index and was updated Sept. 14. According to The Hollywood Reporter’s charts page, the series repeated at No. 1 and has spent seven weeks in the top 10.
ReelShort also holds No. 2 with Rejecting My Five Female Mates, at 37 million views. DramaBox follows with Poisoned by His Love (28 million) and Forbidden Fling With My Bestie’s Dad (22 million). The top four titles total 130 million views, or 65% of the roughly 201 million views across the top 10.
The chart is new this month. Industry newsletter Real Reel, in its roundup for Sept. 8–13, reported that The Hollywood Reporter introduced a Microdrama Chart that week, powered by the Vertical Index. The index tracks more than 70,000 titles across 20 apps every day. Before that, vertical drama performance was scattered across app rankings, company claims and individual view counts, which made comparison difficult.
The market being measured is growing. Owl & Co estimates that vertical microdrama revenue outside China will reach $4 billion this year, up 33% from $3 billion in 2025, Variety reported in August.
ReelShort: five titles, 119 million views. DramaBox: three titles, 61 million
ReelShort holds Nos. 1, 2, 5, 6 and 8. Its five titles total about 119 million views, or 59% of the top 10. DramaBox’s three titles at Nos. 3, 4 and 7 total about 61 million, or 30%. The remaining slots went to DramaWave’s The Silver Angel He Never Recognized (11 million) and Shortical’s Room Service (10 million).
ReelShort is operated by California-based Crazy Maple Studio. The platform generated $1.2 billion in consumer spending last year, TheWrap reported June 5. DramaBox is owned by Singapore-based StoryMatrix. The Hollywood Reporter, citing a Sensor Tower study of the first quarter of 2025, wrote on Dec. 2, 2025, that DramaBox ranked second only to ReelShort in global monetization.
No. 1 is AI-generated animation; L.A. casting calls fall from 15–20 a day to about four
ReelShort’s title page describes Genie as an AI-generated animated ReelShort original. The story follows Elijah Baran, a genie freed on condition that he marry a billionaire’s granddaughter, Christine, for five years. He secretly helps her become a CEO, is belittled throughout the marriage and decides to divorce her. The Hollywood Reporter’s chart note says the verticals sector has been inundated with AI-generated series, including Genie.
ReelShort CEO Joey Jia pointed in the same direction in June at Owl & Co’s inaugural Vertical Media Summit. According to TheWrap, he said that judged purely as a businessman he would stop live-action production immediately, because the market responds far better to AI titles.
Work on live-action sets has thinned. Real Reel, citing Hollywood Reporter coverage, wrote that talent manager Maddie Grove saw casting breakdowns fall from roughly 15–20 vertical productions a day before June to around four, and that actor Kylie Karson said her weekly vertical auditions dropped from as many as 15 to about two.
Top 10 averages 50 episodes; three titles carry werewolf-romance terms
Episode counts in the top 10 run from 30 to 58 and average 50. The shortest is DramaBox’s No. 7, Wipe Out My Pack? A Dumb Pup Turned the Tables!, at 30 episodes. The longest is No. 8, You Can’t Stop My Super X-Ray Vision, at 58.
The titles at Nos. 2, 5 and 7 use “mates,” “alpha” and “pack,” the vocabulary of English-language werewolf romance. The titles at Nos. 3, 4 and 6 foreground forbidden relationships.
Genie and X-Ray Vision are fantasy premises, and Genie has a male lead. “The State of Microdrama,” a Holywater–Owl & Co report covered by Variety on July 24, found that Holywater’s male user share grew from 1.1% in late 2024 to 30.3% in the most recent quarter, that male users lean sci-fi and fantasy at 1.4 times the average, and that romance accounts for 76% of female viewing and 54% of male viewing. The same report found that 65% of users have been watching microdramas for less than a year and that 60% of Holywater subscribers use three or more apps a week.
DramaBox and DramaWave also rank first and second in Korea; no Korean platform in the top 10
Two platforms on this chart also lead the Korean market. According to Sensor Tower’s Korea blog, DramaBox and DramaWave ranked first and second in Korean short-drama app revenue from 2024 into 2026. Vigloo (비글루) was the only Korean-made app in the top 10, and its revenue comes 49% from Korea and 23.5% from the U.S.
No title from a Korean platform appears in Owl & Co’s top 10. Whether the 20 apps tracked by the Vertical Index include any Korean app could not be confirmed from public material.
Korean companies entered the market in larger numbers this year. Kidari Studio (키다리스튜디오)’s Lezhin Entertainment launched Lezhin Snack (레진스낵) in Korea, the U.S. and Japan on Feb. 4, The Korea Economic Daily (한국경제) reported. The Korea Herald reported Feb. 24 that Extreme Job director Lee Byeong-heon (이병헌) released a 47-episode romantic comedy on the service. In the same article, Kakao Ventures (카카오벤처스) valued Korea’s short-form drama market at 650 billion won (about $470 million) in 2024. A microdrama can be produced for as little as 50 million won (about $36,000) per episode, against about 1.5 billion won (about $1.08 million) for a conventional TV drama episode.
AI production is under way in Korea as well. The Korean Film Council (영화진흥위원회)’s Korean Cinema webzine (한국영화웹진) wrote Aug. 10 that AI has cut production costs to as low as 10% of previous levels and shortened production from several weeks to under one week. Spoon Labs (스푼랩스)’ Vigloo opens a global AI short-drama competition, the 2026 Vigloo Short Drama Festival, on Sept. 21 with $20,000 in total prizes, BetaNews (베타뉴스) reported Sept. 14.
Outlook: a weekly chart becomes the common yardstick for a $4 billion market
Owl & Co founder Hernan Lopez called The Hollywood Reporter’s chart launch “a major validation moment,” according to RAIN News. Real Reel noted that streaming had Nielsen and the box office has Comscore, and that measurement is becoming part of this industry’s infrastructure.
A weekly chart makes several things trackable: how many top-10 slots go to AI-generated titles, whether ReelShort and DramaBox keep their share, and whether later entrants such as DramaWave and Shortical climb. The same table will show when a Korean platform or a Korean-produced title enters.
Some details remain undisclosed. The chart footnote does not define a view, whether a play start or a sum across episodes. It covers paid platforms only, so free distribution on TikTok and YouTube is excluded. Variety reported in August that Owl & Co projects $150 billion in 2026 revenue for vertical media as a whole outside China. The $4 billion paid-app business is one part of that.
Sources
– Owl & Co Vertical Index, Top 10 Microdramas (Sept. 7–13; updated Sept. 14)
– The Hollywood Reporter charts page https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/h/charts/
– The Hollywood Reporter, Dec. 2, 2025 (DramaBox–Stage 32) https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/dramabox-seeks-new-u-s-writers-stage32-1236436618/
– RAIN News, “Charting vertical dramas” https://rainnews.com/new-charting-vertical-dramas/
– Variety, July 24 (The State of Microdrama) https://variety.com/2026/tv/news/microdramas-men-romance-sunday-holywater-my-drama-my-muse-1236819953/
– Variety, August (microdrama feature) https://variety.com/2026/tv/features/can-microdramas-save-hollywood-why-vertical-boom-isnt-quibi-1236837033/
– Variety, August (Vertical Economy Report) https://variety.com/2026/digital/news/vertical-media-150-billion-tiktok-microdramas-owl-co-1236840519/
– TheWrap, June 5 (Vertical Media Summit; via Yahoo) https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/tv/articles/microdramas-exploding-5-ways-people-131500793.html
– Real Reel weekly news (Sept. 8–13) https://www.real-reel.com/pocket-saga-ai-microdrama-flareflow/
– ReelShort title page https://www.reelshort.com/movie/the-great-and-powerful-genie-6a5191d8fa9f9f7a09081789
– Sensor Tower Korea blog https://sensortower.com/ko/blog/the-state-of-korea-short-form-drama-app-market
– The Korea Herald, Feb. 24 https://www.koreaherald.com/article/10681268
– The Korea Economic Daily, Feb. 4 https://www.hankyung.com/article/202602044417i
– KOFIC Korean Cinema webzine, Aug. 10 https://magazine.kofic.or.kr/webzine/web3/2853/pdsView.do
– BetaNews, Sept. 14 https://www.betanews.net/article/view/beta202609140012
Quotation marks indicate reported remarks; unquoted passages are summaries of reporting. The Hollywood Reporter material relayed by Real Reel is cited secondhand.
Platform totals and shares are sums of published figures rounded to the nearest million.
Won–dollar conversions use 1,383.3 won per dollar (Seoul market close, Sept. 18).