There are minute-long soap operas. Is America ready?

When Albee Zhang got an offer last spring to make cheap, short-form features for phones, she was skeptical, so she declined.

But the offers kept coming. Finally, Ms. Zhang, who has been a producer for 12 years, realized this could be a profitable new way of storytelling and said yes.

As of last summer, she has produced two short features and is working on another four for various apps that create female-oriented content.

Think: Lifetime movie broken down into TikTok videos. Think of a soap opera, but for the short attention span of the internet age.

The biggest player in this new genre is ReelShort, an app that offers melodramatic content in minute-long, vertically shot episodes and hopes to bring a foreign-based successful formula to the United States by engaging millions of people with its short-form content.

ReelShort is owned by Crazy Maple Studio, a Northern California company backed by Beijing-based digital publisher COL Group.

ReelShort titles include 'The Double Life of My Billionaire Husband', 'I Got Married Without You' and 'Bound by Vendetta: Sleeping With the Enemy'. The shows are formulaic: the storylines include romance and revenge, the characters are archetypal, and the dialogue is simple.

The extremely short genre became popular in the Asia Pacific region during the pandemic, and Crazy Maple Studio CEO Joey Jia took notice.

ReelShort aims to get people hooked as quickly as possible, with much of the action taking place in the first few super short episodes. “This is a pay-as-you-go model,” Mr Jia said. “If people are confused by the story, they will leave.”

The cost of creating these features is relatively low, $300,000 or less, according to Crazy Maple Studios. The crews are small and made up partly of recently graduated film students from Los Angeles, according to actors who worked on the productions.

Viewers can watch ten-minute episodes for free on ReelShort across multiple platforms, including YouTube and TikTok. But at some point they have to pay or watch ads to unlock subsequent episodes.

Sometimes people pay as much as $10 to $20 to keep watching, said Ms. Zhang, the producer. “Isn't that a crazy undertaking?”

In December, Mr. Jia said The Wall Street Journal that the company had already achieved $22 million in revenue.

In the United States, ReelShort is trying to succeed where short-form content company Quibi failed. Quibi launched and shut down in early 2020 the same yearpartly because of what founder Jeffrey Katzenberg does called bad timing: The app offered five- to 10-minute videos of news and entertainment for people on the go, just as people stopped going anywhere due to pandemic lockdowns.

And while Quibi focused on more highbrow content with A-list stars, ReelShort does the opposite: It gives people juicy plot points, from werewolves to evil stepmothers, to secret billionaire husbands to even more werewolves.

“We have learned a lot from Quibi,” said Mr. Jia, director of Crazy Maple Studio. ReelShort isn't trying to appeal to everyone, as Quibi tried to do, he added.

“To build a successful mobile app, you need to figure out your core audience,” he says. And that audience consists of women who like soap operas. (ReelShort's audience is about 75 percent women, Mr. Jia said.)

Mr Jia said he was not trying to compete with streamers like Netflix. If you can sit on the couch for a few hours, ReelShort is probably not the app you open. It's for the in-between moments: at a bus stop, in the bathroom.

“We use a very different business model,” Mr. Jia said, “and serve a different time.”

ReelShort is hardly the first app owned or partially owned by a Chinese company to break through in the United States. TikTok and the shopping apps Shein and Temu have been among the most downloaded apps in Apple's US app store in recent months.

But for TikTok, owned by Chinese company ByteDance, this was problematic. Lawmakers in the United States, Europe and Canada have spoken out about this ensure that TikTok and its parent company can put people's sensitive personal information into the hands of the Chinese government, and they have worked to restrict access to the wildly popular app. ReelShort hasn't faced the same kind of pressure.

Last month, ReelShort was downloaded one million times and earned $5 million in revenue on Apple's app store, according to data firm Sensor Tower, and it was downloaded three million times on the Google Play Store, generating $3 million in revenue there. Since November, ReelShort has ranked somewhere in the top 15 most popular entertainment apps on both app stores on most days. (In November, ReelShort even surpassed TikTok for a few days as the most popular entertainment app in Apple's app store.)

According to data.ai, a total of more than seven million people in the United States will have downloaded ReelShort on Apple and Android phones by 2023. There were more than 24 million downloads worldwide last year. After the United States, India is ReelShort's second largest market, followed by the Philippines.

Kasey Esser, a Los Angeles-based actor who has worked on short-form shows for ReelShort and other apps, described the format as this generation's soap opera. He made a comparison to channels with made-for-TV content, such as Hallmark.

“People know exactly what story they are going to hear, but they will watch it anyway,” says the 34-year-old Mr. Esser. “They will still love it.”

For actress Samantha Drews, ReelShort was an opportunity to play different types of characters. “I can now say that I have been cast in 15 to 16 feature films over the last few years,” said Ms. Drews, 25. “That's not something every actor can say.”

Camille James Harman, 57, played a supporting role in the 2018 film “Vice,” the Dick Cheney biopic starring Christian Bale, which received several Oscar nominations. But she said she received a much bigger response for her starring role as an evil stepmother in the 2023 ReelShort production “The Double Life of My Billionaire Husband.”

Several other apps with names still unknown to many – Sereal+, ShortTV, DramaBox, FlexTV – have started producing such features, hoping to cash in on ReelShort's formula.

The number of new titles appearing on these platforms exceeds that of many traditional streaming services. And if Mr. Jia has his way, that will continue into 2024: “The goal this year is to deliver another 100 titles,” he said.

As ReelShort pumps out content, the quality of the productions improves, says Leomax He, who directed three productions for the app last year. Some shoots now use a stunt or intimacy coordinator.

“The budgets have gotten bigger, the cameras are better, the crews are getting bigger,” said 27-year-old Mr. He.

Major studios have not yet entered the genre, but some actors and filmmakers speculated that American companies would start creating their own short-form content soon enough.

“That's why I do so many of them,” said the actor, Mr. Esser. “It is a unique opportunity to be the first known of this in the US”