September 2026

The Disposable and the Serious
Some Observations on Two Markets and One Set of Tools

By Enrico Vannucci

Scrolling through Instagram recently, I came across a growing number of microdramas, short serialized vertical video built for mobile, one to three minutes an episode, increasingly produced with AI video generation rather than filmed with actors.¹ What I actually encountered was not a sequence of separate episodes but a single reel, minutes long, that lands in a feed and simply keeps going, structured around its own internal cliffhangers so that scrolling away never quite feels like the right moment. This is content made mostly to chase quick returns on whatever a platform happens to be rewarding, repetition as a business model more than a creative choice. It is worth keeping separate from the AI-made work I mentioned in June that circulates on YouTube or Vimeo, work that is usually trying to demonstrate real filmmaking ability with these tools. Microdrama does not attempt that at all.

Whatever one thinks of microdrama as storytelling, it rarely works as performance. Watch closely and the tell is not the image, it is the timing. The rhythm of the acting and the rhythm of the cut both sit slightly wrong, even in the pieces where the visuals themselves hold up. Among that other kind of AI-made work, the kind trying to demonstrate real filmmaking ability, the ones that get this right tend to be where a filmmaker has spent real time on it, combining several tools rather than trusting one to do the whole job.

However it works, and clearly it is working, advertising built on this format has flooded social platforms alongside the content itself. Downloads of this kind of app grew by 95 percent year over year in the first half of 2026, and the advertisers buying into it grew even faster.² But the audience for microdrama is not the audience for the AI-made work that tries to pass as festival-adjacent cinema, and it is worth keeping those separate. One has found a paying public, the other largely has not yet.

In June I wrote that festivals have responded to this early, gold-rush moment mostly through debate, conferences, theoretical frameworks, not yet through structure. One case has since complicated that. The Clermont-Ferrand International Short Film Festival's submission process now asks filmmakers directly whether the images in a film were produced entirely with generative AI, which visual elements are involved if so, whether the same applies to the soundtrack, and separately, whether AI tools were used only to assist at specific stages of the process, writing, production, post-production, editing. It does not disqualify a film. It asks for a declaration.

For now, as far as I have found, this is a single case rather than a pattern. I have not come across an equivalent requirement anywhere else, including among festivals of comparable size and standing. But Clermont-Ferrand is not a marginal actor, so a single case from a festival of that size is not nothing.

What this leaves is less a conclusion than a shape starting to become visible. One market, disposable, mobile-first, built on advertising and micro-payments, is already large and still growing, and currently answers to almost no curatorial framework at all. Another, small and still finding its footing at festivals, has just acquired its first modest instrument of scrutiny. The two are not the same audience, and are unlikely to become one. But the tools underneath both increasingly come from the same handful of companies, and the money now moving toward AI video does not really respect the line festivals and critics draw between disposable and serious. Whether that line holds, or simply gets worn down by scale, is the question worth returning to in the near future.

¹ On the rise of AI-generated microdrama, see: TheWrap, "Could AI-Generated Microdramas Be the Future of Mobile Entertainment?" (June 2026)
² On download and advertiser growth for microdrama platforms, see: Marketing Dive, "Microdrama advertising surges as downloads soar" (August 2026)