Quiet on set. How AI transformed China’s microdrama scene

The Basement Sets of Hengdian Are Going Silent

Earthguardiansonline.com – In a dimly lit basement beneath one of the sprawling studio complexes in Hengdian, the usual chaos of a film shoot plays out: camera operators sprint between positions, choreographers rehearse fight choreography, and a props crew wrestles with rigging a net meant to trap a captive. Actors clad in assassin costumes loiter between takes, lighting cigarettes while freelance stylists dart through the crowd for quick touch-ups. On the surface, nothing has changed. Yet the rhythm of the work has shifted. The number of live-action microdrama productions being shot in this town — and across China — has collapsed, displaced by generative AI video tools that can render the same vertical-format episodes at a tiny fraction of the old cost.

The numbers underscore the speed of the upheaval. Chinese state media reported that more than 120,000 microdramas were released during the first quarter of this year, and roughly 95 percent of them were produced with AI-generated video. Platforms that once overflowed with human-shot content are now saturated with synthetic footage, and the live-action side of the business has been decimated almost overnight.

A “Bitter Winter” for Working Actors

For the people who once filled these sets, the transition has been brutal. Junlin — a 24-year-old performer who goes by her stage name — described the experience of watching her work dry up while dressed in combat boots and a high ponytail, preparing to play a lead assassin in a microdrama that may never get shot.

“With fewer productions hiring, your space for survival is constantly squeezed.”

In the spring months, Junlin had been on set roughly 25 days out of every 30, splitting time between Hengdian and other production cities. By June, that figure had plummeted to seven working days. The anxiety of idle weeks, she admitted, is relentless.

“I’m someone who gets anxious easily. If I’m not on set, I would be in a constant state of anxiety.”

Her story is not isolated. Thousands of young performers and crew members flocked to Hengdian in recent years, drawn by an industry that offered steady, low-barrier entry into screen work during a period of high youth unemployment across China. The town, home to just over 200,000 residents in the rural reaches of Zhejiang province, had become a magnet for microdrama crews shooting inside and around the Hengdian World Studios complex — a decades-old facility famous for its full-scale replicas of imperial landmarks such as the Summer Palace and the Forbidden City, and for serving as the birthplace of numerous Chinese blockbuster films.

How Microdramas Took Hold

The format itself was born of necessity. When cinemas shuttered during the pandemic and audiences migrated to short-video platforms like Douyin and Kuaishou, producers began stitching together rapid-fire narrative clips of roughly 90 seconds each. Individually, each episode is designed for a quick scroll on a smartphone; collectively, the serialized arcs can span the runtime of a feature-length film. Plots tend toward melodrama and spectacle — wicked mother-in-laws, mistaken identities, wartime heroics, wronged lovers — and the genre quickly found a mass audience both domestically and abroad, spawning a multi-billion-dollar export pipeline.

Bi Zhiqiang, 27, moved to Hengdian in 2021 as the industry was still coalescing. He had no formal training in acting or film production, yet the sheer volume of available roles let him build a career almost immediately.

“Once microdramas took off, there was a nonstop stream of roles I could take on as long as I wanted to film. Many people who didn’t even study acting or film and television joined because there were more and more opportunities.”

That era of open doors appears to be closing. Other production hubs — Qingdao, Xi’an, Zhengzhou — had also sprouted purpose-built microdrama complexes with fabricated mansions and period sets, but the same AI-driven cost collapse is reaching them.

Economics, Censorship, and the Road Ahead

The domestic microdrama market was valued at nearly $15 billion last year, according to market-research firm DataEye — almost double the annual box-office revenue of theatrical feature films in China. That scale made the sector one of the most visible case studies of how China’s rapid AI adoption is reshaping creative labor: wiping out established roles while generating new technical positions, leaving workers uncertain about what comes next.

Regulatory pressure is compounding the disruption. New oversight rules scheduled to take effect in September will require microdrama plotlines to “adhere to correct political direction,” tightening the already-watchful gaze of state censors over a genre that has grown faster than any existing review framework could accommodate.

For creatives beyond China’s borders, the Hengdian basement sets offer an early preview of a broader question: if a vertical microdrama can be generated end-to-end by an algorithm at a fraction of the cost of a human crew, what happens to the mid-budget narrative formats that still depend on dozens of workers per production? The silence spreading through those basement floors is, for now, a local phenomenon. The implications are not.