Short drama & web fiction brief, Nov 9: China says over 94% of ~550K new microdramas are AI-made; RTL+ samples Inkitt's CandyJar in Germany

Who this is for, and what it helps you decide

Web novelists and webtoon creators weighing short-drama or animated adaptations; producers and distributors selling verticals to European or Japanese broadcaster streamers; independent horror and thriller filmmakers looking for buyers; and teams making AI dramas in China who need to know how crowded the lane is.

It helps with four calls: how many sampler episodes to give a partner platform and where to send viewers back to your own app; whether a long-running serial is worth negotiating as a multi-season comic or AI adaptation; whether to prepare paid access and side stories for the source work before an adaptation airs; and who besides YouTube might buy a genre short.

Today's watchlist (4 items)

1. Europe and Japan: broadcasters try two routes into vertical drama. RTL said in a November 6 press release that RTL+ now streams the first episodes of selected Inkitt CandyJar romance shorts (Fight Dirty, The Arrangement, Life Is Not a Game, Loving My Brother's Best Friend, His Nerd) in its mobile apps and on the web, with viewers sent to the CandyJar app to keep watching. Quotenmeter added the same day that RTL+ users who switch receive 50 free coins, enough for one more episode, and that Inkitt calls this its first major media partnership in Europe. The pipeline matters to web novelists: independent authors publish on Inkitt's reading app, an AI model picks stories by reader behavior, and winners become Galatea serial fiction or audio and CandyJar verticals made with Inkitt's own Cinematic AI tool (the report says CandyJar still mostly uses real actors). In Japan, Fuji TV's own app FOD SHORT launched the original Kanami to Mittsu no Koi no Aji on November 6: 60 episodes of about one minute each, with five free episodes a day. Useful for: producers supplying or licensing to European and Japanese platforms. Limit: RTL+ disclosed no revenue terms and FOD SHORT no viewing figures.

2. China: supply keeps exploding, and Hongguo's chart is full of sequel comic dramas. Caixin reported on November 5 that Cao Shumin told the November 4 China Radio and Television Quality Creation Conference that nearly 550,000 microdramas launched in the first ten months of this year, close to 17 times the 2025 total, with AI dramas above 94%. On the chart side, third-party tracker Duanju Gongcheng's November 8 Hongguo heat-index top 10 includes seven sequels or numbered series, led by Wanyao Tulu Zhuan Season 14, listed on November 7; another tracker, Novelcatch, tags that title in its Hongguo new-release list (first 14 days) as a 202-episode comic drama adapted from a 2.527-million-character web novel still being serialized, and of the nine titles it shows in its top 10, six are tagged comic dramas, two AI dramas and one live action. Useful for: web novelists with long-running serials, since deep worlds and fight or system premises split easily into many seasons. Limit: the heat index is calculated by third parties from public charts and is not platform views or revenue; the regulator gave only totals and a share.

3. Korea: an adaptation revives its source, while AI web fiction goes unlabeled. Seoul Economic Daily on November 8 published an interview with M Story Hub executive director Seo Sang-hee, given at U-KNOCK 2026 in Los Angeles on November 6: after the Disney+ series The Remarried Empress premiered, she said, the original webtoon earned in one day close to its entire previous month and returned to No. 1 on global platforms outside the US and Japan. The company holds webtoon and web novel IP, is discussing co-development with US partners, and is working with a Japanese firm on an animated Jenau for the second half of next year. A day earlier the same paper reported that Korean e-book ISBN registrations reached 206,673 in 2025, up about 30%, with one author releasing ten AI-assisted titles a day, and that web novel platforms such as NAVER Series and KakaoPage have no separate AI label and no disclosure duty for writers. Useful for: web novelists and webtoon creators in adaptation talks, who should have paid access, side stories and translations ready before the series airs. Limit: the revenue claim is the rights holder's, with no amounts.

4. United States: a horror-only vertical streamer starts buying systematically. Deadline reported on November 6 that Vasaria Pictures, the genre label founded by Saw IV–VI and Saw 3D writers Patrick Melton and Marcus Dunstan with producers Sean Gowrie and Nick Phillips, signed a pact with TerrorBox. TerrorBox will release Vasaria's short Jezebel, which has more than four million views on the YouTube horror channel Alter, as a vertical series; the two will adapt Melton and Dunstan's screenplay Fate for vertical; and Vasaria will consider TerrorBox titles for feature development. Box Entertainment Group launched TerrorBox this year alongside an action and Western sibling, AxnBox, and has recently bought the indie series Dead Signal and the Nightmarish TV library of vertical horror shorts that typically run 90 seconds or less. Useful for: independent horror and thriller makers, since a proven horizontal short can be recut as a vertical series and sub-90-second anthology stories can be packaged as a library. Limit: no deal terms were disclosed.

What remains unclear

The regulator has not published how it counts the 94% AI share; the China Netcasting Services Association quarterly figures Caixin cites in the same article (about 128,000 titles in Q1 with about 122,000 AI; 239,000 in Q2 with 153,000 AI) do not reconcile neatly with the year-to-date share, and we could not resolve the gap. Hongguo chart data come from two third-party sites, and the comic, AI and live-action labels are theirs.

Neither RTL+ and Inkitt nor TerrorBox and Vasaria disclosed financial terms; Inkitt's AI story-selection model and the share of work done with Cinematic AI are described only in press coverage; The Remarried Empress revenue and ranking rebound is the rights holder's account, and there are no platform-level figures for AI web fiction in Korea. None of this was confirmed with the companies.

What it may mean for creators (editorial inference, untested)

Sampler episodes for partner platforms need to stand on their own: RTL+ shows only the opening episodes and FOD SHORT releases five free episodes a day, so the endings around episodes three to five carry the job of getting viewers to switch apps or come back tomorrow. Writers might plan hooks in blocks of five rather than focusing only on an episode-10 paywall. This is editorial inference.

For web novelists, Inkitt's data-first selection and Hongguo's sequel comic dramas both suggest platforms are buying long serials that have already proven themselves; rather than selling outright, spell out sequel, comic or AI-version and source-traffic rights in the license. With Chinese AI supply now running in the tens of thousands of titles a month, cheap look-alike revenge dramas have less room, while narrower genres and deeper worlds, from vertical horror to long xianxia, may find dedicated buyers more easily. All of this is editorial inference.

Related research & methods

Short drama brief, Nov 7: Meta Series tests holiday verticals, Canvas offers creators 30–50% IP, NRTA opens 2-month AI crackdown

Short drama & webnovel brief, Nov 6: China files 159 Class-I dramas for Oct, AI rewrite gray market exposed, Mediaset opens free microdrama tab

Short drama and webtoon brief, Nov 4: ONE Store opens a short-drama tab in Korea, CBC takes short-form pitches, and what writers pitching abroad should watch