Dragons, magic, horror games: Are overseas hit AI dramas blazing a brand-new trail?

At a recent summit focusing on "AI short drama going global", Zou Jianfeng, Chairman of Changdu Technology, pointed out a phenomenon: the traffic of overseas AI short dramas is coming from new genres such as medieval, racing, sports, etc. Instead, AI dramas of traditional themes like modern romance are no longer popular.

Following this signal, DataEye Research Institute reviewed recent popular overseas short dramas and found that a more general trend is emerging: the overseas short drama market is undergoing a change of "changing themes while the core remains unchanged".

Simply put, although most popular short dramas seem to have continuously upgraded themes and selling points, the underlying core that really attracts the audience has never actually changed.

Why is this change accelerating faster and faster? Where will it lead the industry competition?

I. Disassembly of Recent Hit Dramas: Old Core + New Theme

Looking back at recent popular overseas short dramas, the themes are still rich: "pregnancy escape", "real and fake rich daughter", "counterattack and slap in the face" are still common, but the difference is that these themes are more and more incorporated into new settings such as dragon clan, horror game, magic, werewolf, etc.

To analyze this phenomenon, DataEye Research Institute selected several recent popular episodes for disassembly:

(1) Came Back Hotter With Lord's Twins: "Pregnancy Escape" in the Dragon Clan World

This drama is one of the most popular short dramas overseas in August, ranking first on DataEye's Top 100 Overseas Short Dramas List for August with a heat value of 17.813 million.

The story revolves around a heroine with the blood of a dragon slayer: abandoned by her fiancé because of an ugly birthmark, she spends a passionate night with the dragon lord who is cursed with burning pain for a hundred years, becomes pregnant with twins and leaves quietly. Five years later, the heroine's appearance is transformed and her birthmark fades away, and she returns to the dragon domain to find her daughter.

From the content perspective, this is a typical "pregnancy escape" theme, every step of which hits the pleasure points that have been verified by the market long ago. But in form, it is no longer the traditional urban overbearing president and weak heroine: the background setting is replaced by the dragon clan worldview, the overbearing president is replaced by the dragon lord, and the highlight of the heroine lies in her dragon slayer bloodline, which upgrades the suspense of the traditional pregnancy escape theme to the power and bloodline dispute of the entire dragon domain, greatly expanding the imaginative space of the story.

(2) The Full-level Real Daughter Returns Domineeringly and Tears the Green Tea Bitch Apart: "Real and Fake Rich Daughter" in the Magic World

This drama ranks first on DataEye's Top 100 Overseas AI Dramas List for August, with more than 70,000 sets of materials in a single month, far ahead of other dramas.

The plot is just as the title suggests: a genius witch who has been missing for ten years returns strongly, only to find that the whole family dotes on the untalented fake rich daughter and mocks her in every possible way. The heroine directly shows her crushing magic power in the Royal Academy, slaps the fake rich daughter in the face, and tears off the green tea mask of the fake rich daughter layer by layer.

From the content perspective, the "real and fake rich daughter" theme is not new, which has been staged repeatedly in the past in wealthy family feuds and urban inner house struggles. But the difference is that this drama moves the whole story into the magic world, the heroine becomes a genius witch with extraordinary talent, adding a layer of visual spectacle and otherworldly imagination that realistic themes can hardly give to the plot.

(3) Horror Game: Seduce My Ghost Teacher or Die: "Love Strategy" in the Horror Game

This horror campus romance AI drama produced by Wuhan Zaoxiang and launched on the NetShort platform only ranks 7th on DataEye's Top 100 Overseas Short Dramas List for August, but it has been in the top of the daily list and weekly list for many times before, and even once occupied the top of both the Overseas Short Drama Hot List and the Overseas AI List.

The plot is also very simple: the heroine is trapped in a campus horror survival game, and is bound to a "love survival system". She must seduce the dangerous and sexy ghost teacher and complete one intimate task after another to survive.

From the content perspective, "love strategy" can be said to be one of the oldest and most enduring core themes of female-oriented content. This drama also features the heroine pursuing the hero, but the difference is that the plot contradiction changes from "does he love me or not" to "if the strategy fails, I will die". For the same romance theme, the dramatic pressure generated in a safe urban environment and under the threat of horror and death is completely different, and the combination of "romance + horror" also puts the whole story into a relatively rare framework before.

In fact, similar cases are far more than the above several dramas, and many other hits such as The Exiled Princess Becomes the Strongest Wolf Queen all follow the same combination logic: the market-verified "old core" paired with the "new theme" in the AI era.

DataEye Research Institute believes that this combination of "changing themes while the core remains unchanged" is essentially a division of labor mechanism in the AI era:

On the one hand, the old core carries emotional certainty. These routines have been verified by the market for a long time, and the audience can understand them, enjoy watching them, and are always willing to watch them. No matter in China or overseas, the logical core that can arouse the most underlying emotions of users is always interlinked;

On the other hand, new themes provide attention freshness. The audience is used to romance plots under the urban background. When the background is replaced by werewolf, magic world, dragon domain, etc., strangeness and freshness appear immediately. In the entire information flow launch link, this freshness precisely determines whether the user will click on this drama.

In short: recreate freshness for the audience with familiar and mature routines.

II. Why Is the Change Speeding Up?

Strictly speaking, this form of "old core + new theme" is not rare. In the process of localized exploration of short dramas going global, the werewolf and vampire themes are essentially new settings at that time. The really noteworthy point is that since the outbreak of AI short dramas this year, the rhythm of this change is visibly accelerating.

The first batch after April was Western fantasy themes with the background of Greek mythology, among which One Move God Mode on the Maoyan NetShort platform, which takes the counterattack of the son of Poseidon, the sea god, as the main storyline, is one of the most representative works. Soon, a large number of AI dramas of the same type of Western fantasy themes flooded the market, but the core is still the same set of emotion, counterattack, showing off and slapping others in the face.

The second batch is the re-outbreak of werewolf themes supported by AI technology and special effects. "Werewolf" itself is not a new theme, and there have been many attempts in the era of live-action dramas. But in the AI era, as a large number of special effects can be mass-produced at low cost, werewolf dramas have ushered in a dense supply. There are obvious differences in visual perception between the "werewolf" themed short dramas in the live-action drama era and those in the AI drama era.

The third batch is the multi-faceted blooming of dragon clan, magic, orc and other themes up to now. The Came Back Hotter With Lord's Twins and The Full-level Real Daughter Returns Domineeringly and Tears the Green Tea Bitch Apart mentioned above are the representative works of this batch.

In just a few months, the rotation radius of themes continues to expand, from Western fantasy, werewolf to dragon clan, magic, and new themes of overseas short dramas have gone through multiple rounds of iteration.

Why is the rhythm getting faster and faster?

DataEye Research Institute believes that the acceleration of changes is driven by a multi-factor mechanism.

(1) Supply Side: AI Greatly Reduces the Cost of New Themes

The essence of replacing new themes and settings is to change the world setting, art materials and character backgrounds. In the era of live-action dramas, this means that costumes, props, scenes, special effects budgets and shooting cycles are all restarted. But for AI dramas, you only need to change the prompt words and setting descriptions. Although it also requires a certain cost, this part of the cost has almost been reduced to the floor price.

As Zou Jianfeng mentioned: After AI greatly reduces the production cost, all imaginative ideas can be turned into real content.

At the production capacity end, this creative strategy of using AI tools to change new themes has sustainable and normalized production capacity.

(2) Demand Side: "Attention" Competition Amidst Homogenization

For the content industry, homogenization is an inevitable stage in the development of the industry. When the content is highly convergent, the competition for users in the market becomes more and more intense. In the information flow launch link, whoever can catch the user's attention at first glance is more likely to win the competition.

Under this homogenized competition, traditional urban overbearing president themes can hardly support differentiation and attract users' attention. Therefore, replacing with new settings, new backgrounds and new worldviews has become the antidote to compete for users' attention and improve click-through rate.

(3) It is Essentially a Customer Acquisition Problem

Looking at both the supply and demand sides, we can find that new themes essentially serve the problem of customer acquisition, not the problem of creation: it first solves the freshness and click-through rate of materials, rather than the originality of content.

Of course, this does not mean that the creation side is not important. It is just that when most players in the industry have not formed significant content barriers, the launch effect largely determines the life and death of the business, and "changing the outer theme without changing the core" is the most effective and easiest competitive variable to realize under this structure in the AI era.

From this perspective of the overseas short drama market, we can find that the large-scale new drama production capacity and traffic testing represented by Maoyan NetShort and Kunlun Wanwei's DramaWave are becoming one of the barriers for head platforms.

III. Freshness Will Inflate, Where Is the End Point of New Themes?

Looking back at the rapid rotation of themes and settings of overseas AI dramas this year, a question can not help but arise: new themes are being replaced faster and faster, and users' freshness will inflate sooner or later, so where is its end point?

DataEye Research Institute's judgment is: new themes always solve the problem of "being seen", not "being finished watching". The difference of one word determines what will happen in the second half of the industry.

(1) The Freshness Period of New Themes Is Being Shortened by All Peers

The core of new themes and settings is to tap the freshness of users. But when AI breaks the cost of setting change, the cost for peers to follow suit is also broken through.

Take the first batch of exploding "Western fantasy" worldviews as an example. It only takes about a few weeks from the emergence of the first few hits to the spread of a large number of Western fantasy AI dramas in the later stage. A new theme only has a freshness period of about two weeks from "emergence" to "flooding".

This means that the "new theme" itself will depreciate rapidly, followed by the decline of user freshness and aesthetic fatigue. Practitioners can only look for the next new theme, and so on, each round of freshness period is compressed, and trying new themes has become a short-term dividend for first-movers and an arms race for all members, which is difficult to form a sustained advantage.

(2) AI Should Also Bring the Industry the Motivation to Explore New Cores

It will be clearer if we separate user acquisition and retention: new themes attract users' clicks in information flow advertisements, but after clicking, it is still the emotional rhythm of the plot core that determines whether users will continue to watch the drama and pay for it.

When the settings tend to be homogeneous, the competition will naturally return to the core level. After all, themes and settings can be copied quickly, but the polishing of the core requires real content capabilities. It is just that now it is still in the early stage of the AI drama outbreak, and the attention dividend of new themes and new settings is still relatively obvious.

For the micro-short drama industry, the incremental dividends brought by new settings, new backgrounds and new worldviews are certainly worth paying attention to, but what AI brings to the industry may not only be these.

DataEye Research Institute believes that the industry can pursue new themes, but cannot only pursue the themes themselves. Allocating part of the efficiency increment released by AI to the testing of "new themes and settings" and part to the exploration of "core" may be a more robust path.

After all, with the development of technology, themes will continue to change, but how far and steadily the industry can go, and where the next round of increment comes from, will eventually return to the most essential content level.

This article is from the WeChat official account "DataEye Short Drama Going Global", the author is Gu Yu, and published by 36Kr with authorization.