WEBTOON is turning 6 fan-favorite webcomics into microdramas

Microdramas are having a moment.

The bite-sized, vertically shot shows pack soapy romances, billionaire fantasies, revenge plots, and outrageous cliffhangers, all built for the smartphone screen. Already a massive business in China, the format has taken off in the U.S. on platforms like ReelShort and DramaBox by essentially condensing the emotional highs of a soap opera into the rhythms of TikTok.

Now, WEBTOON is getting in on the action. On Aug. 17, the digital comics platform will launch Short Dramas, a slate of six live-action vertical series adapted from popular romance webcomics, including Maybe Meant to Be, Love Bites, and I’ll Marry Your Brother.

And if any entertainment company seems particularly well-suited to the format, it’s WEBTOON. Long before TikTok trained us to scroll through an endless feed of vertical videos, WEBTOON was getting millions of readers accustomed to scrolling through serialized stories on their phones.

“When you look at the DNA of microdramas in terms of being episodic, in terms of the hooks and the story tropes, and also the sort of cliffhanger structures, that DNA is really similar to WEBTOON webcomics,” Fred Lee, an executive at WEBTOON Entertainment who oversees the company’s expansion into vertical dramas, told Mashable.

In other words, WEBTOON already taught millions of people to scroll through stories. Now it’s betting they’ll scroll through TV, too.

Why WEBTOON is getting into microdramas

Microdramas have exploded into a booming corner of mobile entertainment, attracting audiences with heightened emotions, familiar tropes, relentless cliffhangers, and episodes short enough to consume between TikToks. The format generated an estimated $11 billion globally in 2025 according to research firm Omdia, while the U.S. has emerged as one of its most lucrative markets.

WEBTOON has been watching. Lee said the company began paying closer attention to the format over the past year as microdrama platforms attracted increasingly large audiences and built fandoms around their shows. But he sees what’s happening as bigger than the popularity of any one type of microdrama.

For much of the format’s rise, microdramas have become synonymous with a particular kind of storytelling: soapy, steamy romances built around instantly recognizable fantasies and dramatic twists. Lee believes those shows are just one manifestation of a broader change in how audiences consume entertainment.

“Audience behavior is starting to shift toward vertical video as a format in and of itself,” he said, describing today’s dominant style of microdrama as “one subset” of what vertical storytelling could eventually become.

That gives WEBTOON an interesting opening. Unlike companies built entirely around microdramas, WEBTOON isn’t dependent on vertical video becoming its primary business. Instead, Short Dramas can exist alongside the webcomics people already come to the platform to read.

“We’re not solely built on microdramas,” Lee said. “We already have an established ecosystem, and web comics are our core business. So we’re not in the same kind of arms race.”

Instead, the company can start with something many competitors have to manufacture from scratch: stories with established audiences.

“What sets us apart is that we already have these built-in fandoms, so we have proven stories,” Lee said.

Of course, WEBTOON is starting with romance

If you’ve spent any time watching microdramas, WEBTOON’s decision to make its entire first slate romance probably won’t surprise you.

The genre has become foundational to the format, where marriage contracts, forbidden relationships, revenge plots, billionaires, betrayals, and seemingly impossible romantic pairings can provide an immediate hook.

For its first six adaptations, WEBTOON deliberately leaned into that appetite while trying to represent different corners of its romance catalog.

“We started with romance,” Lee said. “Just seeing that romance is so big in this format, we wanted to lean into that for our initial batch as well.”

The company also wanted a mix that could appeal to different age groups, from YA and new adult audiences to older romance readers. The slate includes BL romance as well, a genre Lee noted is already popular on WEBTOON.

Why does romance translate so easily to a format built around keeping viewers watching for just one more episode? Lee thinks part of it comes down to emotional efficiency.

“At the end of the day, viewers want to be moved,” he said. “We’re all emotionally driven. We all respond to the same kind of emotional triggers, whether they be happy or sad, and everything in between.”

Romance, he added, offers a “roller coaster of emotions” particularly suited to vertical video.

And WEBTOON certainly isn’t short on source material.

The 6 WEBTOON Short Dramas launching Aug. 17

The first Short Dramas slate draws from webcomics that collectively have attracted more than a billion global views, ranging from supernatural YA romance to revenge-fueled melodrama.

Love Bites

A shy 17-year-old vampire falls for the charming new boy at school, only to discover his crush is a werewolf — and therefore his species’ sworn enemy.

The BL romance stars Tristan Bilodeaux and Marc Ciccarelli and is directed by Daniel Russell, with a script by Kaelyn Armstrong and Tiffany Zhao. Ideali Projects produces.

Love Bites is based on the WEBTOON adaptation of the Wattpad romance webnovel Bite Me, which has reached more than 146 million global views.

In other words: vampires, werewolves, forbidden romance. An irresistible combination.

Maybe Meant to Be

After years of being pressured to settle down, a struggling freelancer impulsively proposes a marriage of convenience to her childhood friend. Their fake relationship, naturally, starts feeling considerably less fake.

Molly Anderson and Zachary Rist star in the adaptation, directed by Miguel Ferrer and written by Armstrong and Zhao. A to Z Productions produces.

The original Maybe Meant to Be is the biggest webcomic represented in WEBTOON’s initial slate, with more than 650 million global views.

It’s also one of the slate’s more straightforward romantic comedies, trading some of the heightened melodrama associated with microdramas for the familiar pleasures of childhood friends, fake marriage, and two thirtysomethings slowly realizing the obvious.

Swolemates

A cocky influencer and a nerdy gamer girl begin training together, only for their unlikely friendship to push them out of their respective comfort zones — and toward romance.

Eliana Fraser and Tyler Lawrence Gray star, with Eric Schwager directing from a script by Maxwell Warchol. Knockout Shorts produces.

The comedy webcomic Swolemates is based on has amassed more than 60 million global views.

Rules for Dating Trash

After a toxic ex destroys her trust, a college student returns to campus determined to stop dating altogether. Then, because this is a romance, an irresistible bad boy shows up to challenge those plans.

Halle Fletcher and Noah Andre star in the adaptation, directed by Elizabeth Jaleigh Davis and written by Evan Enderle. Apoorv Arora produces.

The original romance webcomic Rules for Dating Trash has reached more than 140 million global views.

Dirty Deeds

A young maid working at a mystical retreat for the wealthy has her quiet life disrupted by the brash heir to a powerful conglomerate. Their relationship forces her to confront a traumatic past while an improbable romance threatens both of their lives.

Jameson Leigh Muntz and Jordan Roy Frank star. Rhys Raiskin directs from a script by Warchol, with Vertical Romance producing.

The Dirty Deeds webcomic has attracted more than 187 million global views.

I’ll Marry Your Brother

And then there’s I’ll Marry Your Brother, which may have the most microdrama-ready premise of them all.

After her cheating husband betrays her and steals her family’s company, a wealthy heiress wakes up five years in the past — on her wedding day. Armed with knowledge of what’s coming, she vows to destroy her husband at any cost, including marrying his older brother instead.

Mellisa Goodwin and Franky Cammarata star in the revenge romance, directed by Roku Long and written by Warchol. Narval Films produces.

Its source webcomic has reached more than 73 million global views.

Betrayal. Time travel. Revenge. A strategically selected brother. Sometimes a premise really does sell itself.

Turning hundreds of millions of views into a few minutes of video

Of course, having proven IP creates another problem: Those millions of readers already know these stories. Adapting a sprawling webcomic into a microdrama means deciding which characters, arcs, and moments are essential enough to survive a much more compressed format.

“It’s the same with any adaptation where the IP, especially when it comes to books and web comics, there’s a lot more in the story than is possible to necessarily tell in the AV adaptation,” Lee said.

For each series, writers had to examine character arcs and story elements and determine what would work in vertical video. WEBTOON also contacted the original creators about adapting their work, and Lee said all six were supportive of the projects.

But the Short Dramas aren’t supposed to replace the original stories. “The vertical videos are not designed to supplant web comic readership,” Lee said. “It is a supplement.”

Ideally, someone who already loves Maybe Meant to Be gets to see its characters brought to life, while someone encountering the story through its Short Drama might be compelled to seek out the much larger webcomic waiting behind it.

WEBTOON wants that movement to go both ways. “You come for the web comics, you stay for the video episodes, you check out the microdramas, and then you come back to check out other web comic titles,” Lee said, describing it as a “virtuous cycle.”

Microdramas move at a very different speed

The shows themselves may be tiny, but making them still requires something recognizable as traditional filmmaking.

Lee describes his first experience on a microdrama set as “the most chaotic ballet,” with writers, actors, directors, producers, and crew working together much as they would on any other production.

“It’s just making an indie movie on a really fast pace,” he said.

WEBTOON partnered with six production companies for the initial slate, with the shows filmed in Los Angeles using local production crews. Lee said WEBTOON spent longer in development than may be typical for the microdrama industry, but once the shows entered pre-production, the process moved quickly: roughly three months from pre-production to delivery.

That speed is part of the format’s appeal. “From development to finished product, it takes a fraction of the time to create something more long-form,” Lee said.

At a moment when generative AI is increasingly being pitched as another way to make entertainment faster and cheaper, WEBTOON is drawing a line around how its first slate was made.

“All of our productions were 100 percent human-made,” Lee said. “There’s nothing quite like seeing human emotion on a human canvas.”

Could a microdrama become the next step in Hollywood’s IP pipeline?

WEBTOON’s experiment gets more interesting when you look beyond these six shows. The company has a massive library of stories and an enormous amount of information about which ones have already attracted audiences. A webcomic can accumulate tens or hundreds of millions of views before WEBTOON ever puts actors in front of a camera. A microdrama gives it another potential data point.

Asked whether vertical dramas could eventually serve as a proving ground for stories that might graduate to traditional television or film, Lee said he sees the possibility.

“Especially when you look at a microdrama where the fandom is loud and loyal, I think it would make a lot of sense to then look at the possibilities for a horizontal adaptation, whether it be TV or film,” he said.

That creates a potentially intriguing path for IP: A story can begin as a webcomic, find an audience, become a relatively fast and inexpensive live-action vertical series, and — if that audience follows — potentially make another jump into long-form entertainment.

But Lee doesn’t necessarily see those formats as a ladder, with one inherently more valuable than another. “I think the future of content is not siloed necessarily,” he said. “It’s not necessarily just about web comics, just TV or film. It’s about building stories that can really live on all types of formats.”

Is the future of TV vertical?

Spend enough time talking to people working in digital entertainment right now, and you’ll eventually hear some version of the same prediction: The future is vertical.

For an entire generation, holding a phone upright isn’t an alternative way of consuming entertainment. It’s the default.

“When you look at the younger generation, they are truly mobile native from the get,” Lee said. “They are pretty much born with phones in their hands or phones pointed at them… I think moving forward, the future is going to be in vertical content.”

The bigger bet isn’t simply that audiences will watch vertically — they already do. It’s that they’ll embrace the format for longer, serialized stories, too.

That doesn’t necessarily mean vertical dramas have to replace traditional television. The boundaries between webcomics, social video, microdramas, streaming series, and movies are already becoming increasingly porous. A story doesn’t have to belong to a single format anymore, and neither does its audience.

“There’s no end to really great storytelling,” Lee said. “Really great stories and really great characters can live across formats.”

Source: https://mashable.com/life/webtoon-launching-short-dramas