Hollywood’s New Pilot Season Is Vertical and Powered by AI
Let's start with a new reality: short, serialized dramas built for the phone are no longer a curiosity. They're a multi-billion dollar industry with a new playbook.
The proof is in the numbers. In China, the micro-drama market has exploded to nearly $7 billion, surpassing the domestic box office—a stat that has every executive's attention. Now, the West is building the infrastructure to compete. Ventures like MicroCo are launching with an AI-native cost base to create 1-3 minute "microseries." The message is clear: Hollywood's next pilot season is vertical.
When I read all of this, it sounds more than just theory as it is in fact a reality I have been living for the past 18 months.
My co-founder Nick Montori and I started in April 2024 what we thought was just a hobby. As we experimented with new AI tools, we set ourselves a creative challenge: could we reinvent the Victorian ‘Penny Dreadful’ for the 21st century? The goal was the same: cheap, thrilling, serialized stories for a modern audience.
We launched a TikTok channel called Anima Journeys and began posting our AI-generated sci-fi shorts.
The result was something we never could have imagined. Our channel exploded, now standing at over 600,000 followers and 120 million views. But the true signal wasn't the numbers; it was the passionate community forming in our comments section, demanding more: "This needs to be a movie," "When is this series coming out?"
Our audience was greenlighting our next move. We listened and created a full cinematic trailer for a new cinematic universe based on the content of the TikTok stories, "The Great Galactic War", which validated everything.
This eventually became the spark that led us to found Anima Studios with two other partners. We saw with absolute clarity that AI was the engine for this new creative economy, perfect for producing everything from ads to short films to the micro-dramas captivating the world.
This is the new playbook.
The #BookTok phenomenon proved that community passion is the new greenlight. But the real revolution is how AI supercharges this trend, unlocking incredible new possibilities.
For the first time, we have the power to tap into that energy directly. We can take an uprising but overlooked IP from the feed, or even a classic, out-of-copyright story that an audience is rediscovering, and create stunning cinematic adaptations with AI. We can do it all at the speed of culture, turning a viral moment into a visual world in weeks, not years.
It was actually thanks to one of Dennis Papirowski's recent LinkedIn posts that I started digging deeper into this trend. In a subsequent chat with him, the core insight crystallized for me: the barrier between audience and creator isn't just dissolving; it’s becoming a true creative partnership.
The next great franchise won't be a studio's risky bet. It will be a story the world is already asking for, brought to life and validated by the very community that loves it. The future of storytelling is here.
About the series & the author
This article is part of an ongoing series exploring the monumental shift of generative AI across the creative industries—from business and philosophy to technology and storytelling. We’re challenging myths, unpacking value, and redefining what creativity means in this new era.
I’m Riccardo Fredro, founder of Anima Studios—where we fuse cutting‑edge AI with over a decade of storytelling, filmmaking, marketing, and sound design to craft visually stunning, emotionally resonant content. Through this series, I’ll share insights and actionable perspectives on how generative AI is transforming leadership, culture, and the creative economy.
Stay tuned for more — and let’s reimagine creativity together.
