Your Face Is Their Content Now

Vertical drama promised to save Hollywood’s jobs. Instead, it’s quietly turning the people who built it into raw material for AI.

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Remember when vertical drama was the underdog story? The scrappy little format that hired actors Hollywood ignored, paid them fast, and gave them millions of views. The industry that was supposed to be the lifeboat for a sinking film business.

That story is dying. And this week, it got a headstone.

The Neighbours Scandal Nobody Saw Coming

For 40 years, Neighbours was Australian TV royalty. It launched careers, including Margot Robbie’s. Now, according to reporting first carried by The Guardian, a company called RoseBerry Media is feeding its archive into an AI-assisted workflow called RedSnapper and recutting it into vertical microdramas for its Epis platform. The spotlight storyline? Margot Robbie’s old character, of course.

The company’s head, Guy Hameiri, calls it “premium vertical television.”

The cast calls it something else.

Stefan Dennis, the man who played Paul Robinson for decades, described the project as invasive and both morally and legally wrong. Matthew Werkmeister, who played Zeke Kinski, says he only found out because journalists started calling him. He signed his original contract at 13 years old. Vertical streaming didn’t exist. Generative AI didn’t exist. And yet here is his teenage face, chopped into two-minute cliffhangers he never agreed to, on a platform he’d never heard of.

Another former cast member compared it to taking a Picasso, cutting it into pieces and gluing it back together with a machine.

Let that sink in. If this can happen to one of the most famous soaps in the English-speaking world, what do you think is happening to the actors nobody is watching out for?

The Actors Who Woke Up As Clones

Here’s the part the industry would rather you scroll past.

Vertical actors Ashley BeLoat and Evan Gambardella told Business Insider earlier this year that platforms allegedly took their performances and likenesses from live-action shows and reused them in fully AI-generated projects, without asking. According to that same reporting, platforms including MoboReels, GoodShort and ReelShort have distributed AI remakes of live-action series.

How is that even legal? Fine print. Most vertical drama actors are non-union, and their contracts often hand the platform broad “editing rights.” Nobody signing those papers imagined “editing” would one day mean replacing you entirely with a synthetic copy of yourself.

Writers aren’t safe either. Writer-actor Tess Dinerstein sold a script to DramaBox in 2025. DramaBox owns the rights, fair and square. But she’s told The Hollywood Reporter she won’t watch or promote the AI adaptation. When the person who wrote the story refuses to look at it, that tells you everything about the product.

Two-Thirds Fake and Climbing

This isn’t a few bad apples. It’s the business model now.

Consulting firm Owl & Co’s latest report, covered by The Hollywood Reporter on October 20, found that two-thirds of vertical drama releases outside China in Q3 2026 were AI-generated. In China, where the format was born, the figure is a staggering 91%. The Ankler notes the West typically trails China by 18 to 24 months.

Do the math. By 2028, a human face in a vertical drama might be the exception.

And audiences? They’re watching anyway. ReelShort’s The Great and Powerful Genie, which the app itself labels AI-generated, topped The Hollywood Reporter’s first-ever Microdrama Chart with roughly 43 million views in a single week.

The machine is winning. The question is who it’s eating.

Is That Henry Cavill?

And then there’s the lookalike problem.

Viewers and industry watchers, including Vertical Drama Love’s Cooper, have pointed out how much certain AI characters in DramaWave’s The Rise of the Lycan Queen and DramaBox’s Deny Me, Dragon King resemble Henry Cavill’s Witcher. Deny Me, Dragon King isn’t some obscure title, either. It’s one of the best-performing microdramas on the market right now.

Nobody has proven anything. But when your hottest AI hero looks suspiciously like one of the most recognizable fantasy stars alive, you don’t get to act surprised when people start asking where the training data came from.

China already showed us where this road ends. Earlier this year, the AI series The Peach Blossom Hairpin was pulled from ByteDance’s Hongguo app after real people recognized their own faces on its characters, and one of them announced plans to sue.

The Gold Rush is Turning Into a Bloodbath

Here’s the irony. All this cost-cutting isn’t even saving the industry.

According to The Ankler, the 16 biggest vertical apps outside China released 32,000 titles in just three months. That’s more than 10,000 new shows a month, all fighting for the same thumbs. Many apps are spending half or more of their revenue just to acquire users. And the first big-name casualty is already here: VeYou, launched by Top Gun: Maverick producer Tommy Harper, is shutting down its standalone app on November 6.

So the pitch is: flood the market with cheap AI content, burn cash buying viewers, and quietly replace the humans who made the format worth watching in the first place. Brilliant.

The Bodony Take

I cover this industry because of the people in it. The actors who shoot 80 episodes in a week. The writers who craft cliffhangers that keep millions hooked at 2 a.m. They built this format when Hollywood was laughing at it.

Now some platforms are treating them like a free dataset.

AI isn’t the villain here. Consent is the line. If a platform wants your face, your voice or your story in an AI project, the rules should be simple: ask first, credit them, pay them. SAG-AFTRA’s 2026 contract already requires consent for digital replicas. Non-union actors deserve the same basic respect, and platforms that refuse should be named, loudly.

Vertical drama had a chance to be the industry that did it differently.

Right now, it’s looking a lot like the industry that did it worse.

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Are you a vertical drama actor or writer who’s found your work in an AI project you never approved? My DMs are open. @anhel_hasula