ReelShort made $1.2 billion on werewolf romances. Watch Club wants to do it better.

March 25, 2026·37 min·3 clips

ReelShort made $1.2 billion on werewolf romances; Henry Soong's Watch Club aims to reinvent micro-dramas for young audiences.

Micro dramas sound ridiculous until the money shows up. Rebecca Balan lays out the category: vertical, mobile-first scripted shows, usually about a minute long, with ReelShort making $1.2 billion in consumer spending last year alone. Amanda Silberling brings the raised eyebrow early. She has been thinking about micro dramas, social media, and the strange pull of werewolf billionaire romance, which gives the segment its bite. Then the conversation gets more serious. Henry Soong says Watch Club exists because modern social media can become scary for young people, even when builders start with good intentions. That honesty matters. He does not try to pretend binge mechanics are harmless. The answer sits with the tension between making something people want to keep watching and worrying about what that habit does over time. A host asks the hard version: if short-form video gets blamed for damaged attention spans and addictive design, does a short-form drama app deserve the same scrutiny? Henry does not dodge into legal language. His answer is careful: people can be proud of what they build on purpose while still worrying about what the product becomes at scale. That is where the episode turns. What starts as a joke about disapproving werewolf mothers-in-law becomes a real market question about whether a huge format can be rebuilt around different stories. Watch Club wants the narrower lane: grounded coming-of-age stories about young women and LGBTQ teens facing the biggest problems, anxieties, and issues in their lives, not billionaire fantasy hooks. The pitch is not that micro drama is slow media. It is that the same short-form mobile habit might carry stories with more emotional weight than doomscrolling. Rebecca keeps the conversation moving, Amanda keeps poking at the weak spots, and Henry has to explain what product responsibility means when entertainment is designed to be swallowed one minute at a time.

As heard by us

Micro dramas get a sharp, skeptical look, with the business risks left in view.

The episode treats micro dramas as more than a fad. It looks at the category's pull, the money around ReelShort, and the founder's case for building the format with better judgment. What works is the refusal to stop at scale.

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Why you'd press play

You want the pitch behind billion-dollar micro dramas without the hype.

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