The Fatal Lie of “Quality” Stories

Howdy Storytellers 🤠!

Happy new year! It’s Michael, here. 90%+ of storytellers believe this ONE fatal lie that is the #1 culprit of stories that remain shelved in desk drawers and flops that light boatloads of money on fire.

Before I dive into it, first, let me share with you some exciting updates from Creatorwood (we don’t slow down during the holidays!). For those that don’t know, Creatorwood helps people turn their stories into movies and shows with AI (while maintaining consistency of characters, settings and more) and sell films directly to viewers. 

Okay, now let’s get into it 👇

With Creatorwood gearing up to officially launch support for the creation of vertical shows with AI, I’ve been thinking a lot about the vertical film market. 

Similar to how Romantasy has taken over the publishing world in 2025, the vertical craze is taking over Hollywood with hundreds of millions in investment being pumped into vertical productions in 2026.

After seeing the success of apps like ReelShorts and Dramabox, which are now raking in $1 billion+ per year in the US, tons of studios, creators, and more are looking to create the next “vertical hit” that can expand the market.

For those who want a primer on verticals, check out this YouTube video from me HERE.

Some will do spectacularly well. Some will lose a ton of money. This is, of course, the nature of entertainment. Not every book will be a best-seller. Not every show will be a hit.

Our goal at Creatorwood has been to lower the barrier to entry for everyone so that anyone can build a business making movies and shows with AI or just bring their story to life. 

Despite this, making films with Creatorwood, especially longer length ones, is an investment (just as self-publishing your book and paying for an editor and cover design is an investment). I know what it’s like to personally spend $10k+ of my own hard earned money on creative projects and make back just 10% of it.

I don’t want that to happen to you.

And it’s why I’m going to share with you today what this fatal lie is and how you should approach your storytelling instead. There’s no guarantees in this business.

But following is a lesson hard-earned after writing 12 sci-fi novels, starting a software company in college that helped authors $1M+ a year, and then helping lead strategy at MrBeast – the largest creator in the world.

I won’t bury the lede. Here’s the rub right upfront: most people believe that for their story to succeed it must be “high-quality”. Whether it’s a cinematic film or a book literary critics adore, most of our cultural conceptions around quality prioritize one’s access to capital, creative talent, and gatekeeper approval – rather than putting Audience First.

What this means is that in pursuit of “quality” storytelling, most forget the fundamental truth of all storytelling: your story must fulfill an unmet desire for your audience. This is what I call a Story Gap (I go into detail about this here).

Today, I’m going to share with you how you can find and exploit story gaps and why sometimes the notions of quality that Hollywood insiders and New York editors prize is the exact opposite of what viewers actually want. 

I want to share 3 startling trends I’ve seen in the vertical market. Maybe I’ll ruffle feathers with this. But I don’t care. 

It’s 3 core risks that if any production can not address could mean a significantly worse chance at success. And the beauty is that these first principles apply whether you are self-publishing your latest book or a studio looking to spend $100k+ on VIP Production for an 8 hour production.

Let’s unpack this one. Cause at the surface this is extremely logical.

If you have watched any short-drama show you can immediately tell that the stories are often times simple, quick-hits of dopamine. Imagining Marty Supreme as a vertical show… is a stretch!

Thus, many studios are now pumping more money into producing higher budget verticals sometimes with high six figure or low seven figure budgets (with Creatorwood’s VIP Production we can make one for ~$20k for you, but traditionally verticals have been produced for around $200k).

The idea is: Higher quality stories + higher quality acting + higher quality sets = More viewers and more money.

Again the instinct makes sense.

But the logic is incredibly flawed.

To understand the rise of verticals, you MUST understand the Viewer Growth Engine they have used to acquire an audience. 

A Viewer Growth Engine is a scalable way to grow your audience and turn strangers into long term paying customers of your films.

It’s the bread and butter of any film business and the thing most people ignore. At MrBeast, I got to help refine the growth engine that acquires him 10+ million subscribers a MONTH on YouTube alone. I even created a course all about how to build your own Viewer Growth Engine called the Six-Figure Film Accelerator (you can join here).

For verticals, particularly apps like DramaBox and ReelShorts, their Viewer Growth Engine has been Meta Ads (and increasingly a bit of TikTok Ads).

This is the magic of a great Viewer Growth Engine. Once you nail it, just one channel can scale to $1 billion+ as in the case of verticals.

But here’s the HUGE kicker.

Not every type of story is going to work in every kind of growth engine. Different growth engines allow you to reach different audiences with different story desires with varying levels of cost.

On Meta, video ads tend to be cheaper (at least for now). Creating engaging video ads on Meta isn’t easy —> the content must be super fast-paced, extremely simple (think of Dharr Mann studios and similar viral Facebook content studios), and primarily these ads have crushed it with women, who already had a long history of buying serial fiction (on apps such as Radish… now shut down).

The thesis of higher quality stories + higher quality acting has little data to back up it working given the existing growth engine of verticals being Meta Ads.

Quibi already tried the classic Hollywood playbook of a talent led growth engine to grow its viewership. That was a spectacular failure of a $1 billion money pit (spoiler alert: the talent led growth engine AND stories did not align with the context in which viewers experienced their films).

Is it possible that a different type of content thesis could work in the Meta Ads growth engine that has been the bread and butter of verticals? Sure, it’s possible.

Is it possible that there is another untapped growth engine for verticals that could work really well and as a result bring in a different audience? Absolutely.

But here’s the problem with the lie of premium storytelling. 

Our base stem adores status. There’s no status in the kinds of soap opera dramas ReelShorts is making. Film investors find it way less sexy to put their money into – and odds are you find it way less sexy to make these kinds of films (the irony given that so many of them are romantic in nature 😂).

Takeaway #1: Putting Viewers First means the first question front and center should be how will you REACH viewers and is the story you are creating designed to be packaged in a way that can easily garner traffic in your primary growth engine?

As with anything in life ever, it’s a process of iteration and experimentation. Start with a hypothesis and test if it will work. The broken thinking in the lie of “premium storytelling” with verticals is that without closer scrutiny, at the surface this thinking does not prioritize your viewer growth engine.

Now onto lie #2.

If you love science fiction stories, as I do, odds are if you hear about vertical film – you’ll want to make a science fiction story.

Here’s the problem when we analyze a content format, in this case vertical film, and divorce format from genre and ultimately audience.

These factors are coproductive.

The format itself and the device it is watched on leads to the ways you can reach people and how you can reach them with your story. Who, how, and when you reach people then dictates the place that the story holds in their lives.

And each of us all have a drastically different content diets depending on our mood, time of day, and what activity we are engaged in. Think of this as similar to your food diet. You might eat cereal for breakfast, but how about for dinner (I’m guilty of this sometimes 😂)? How about for dessert?

Now let’s bring this to your experience of consuming media.

Will you watch the next hit action thriller while driving in your car? I certainly hope not! (Focus on the road and listen to an audiobook instead 😊).

How about after dinner and you curl up on the couch near your fireplace. Are you going to be pulling out your phone and watching a vertical film, or do you want to relax with a glass of wine and watch something on your big screen? And how does the screen and as a result time of day and your mood affect what kinds of stories you want to watch? 

The answer is NOT the same for all of us. Our content diets are even more diverse than our food diets. For some we may relax in the evening watching true crime shows. For others, we may want to put on a reality television show of the real housewives and take comfort in the fact that despite the drama in our own lives, the ladies on screen always seem to have more chaos going on than you. 

This brings us to the essential point.

Takeaway #2: Putting Viewers First means you must ask yourself: based on your Viewer Growth Engine, what context will your viewers experience your film in?

With Meta ads 90%+ of traffic comes from mobile devices. To create a frictionless experience for a viewer using Meta Ads, creating films optimized for the phone is essential. This goes beyond just a film being “vertical” and filmed in 9:16.

This extends to to the 3 elements of film context:

The GAP that vertical films fill in the lives of many viewers who watch them today explains why romance soap operas with low production budgets, stories that aren’t all that deep, and quick dopamine-fueled episodes have thrived.

It’s what the viewers want. And verticals aren’t successful in spite of these factors. They are successful because of them.

The truth is MOST watch time on films is not on the premium high production quality content that we are used to seeing critics buzz about. Thus, most of the money made in filmmaking is from films that many would consider not to be “high quality” despite the fact that they quietly serve needs for hundreds of millions of viewers.

Thus, as you make your film in the Movie Machine, YOU are likely imagining watching it on the big screen with your family and friends. You should… it’s a beautiful and exciting moment!

BUT, that may NOT be how your viewers experience it.

And your real job, as you understand what story you want to make into a film, needs to be understanding when, where, and how will my viewers likely watch my film and how does this affect what kind of film I will make? And most importantly, is the context in which a viewer watches my film in alignment with the Viewer Growth Engine that I’ll use to reach them?

Now onto lie #3…

Okay sure… but… you think just creating films with guns and fight scenes will solve all your problems?

Let’s dive into putting our Viewers First. Let’s step into the shoes of a man watching a film on a mobile device (i.e. the device size vertical films are designed for).

And “men” is obviously way too broad of a descriptor. It’s a massive generalization.

And no… I’m not asking you to dive into demographics or what state they live in.

Let’s dive into something more fundamental —> what is this person interested in? What are their passions? What are their fantasies? What are their fears?

I’ll immediately use some proxies.

The vertical film market was largely pioneered by ReelShorts. ReelShorts was a spin off (and is in part owned) by a Chinese web fiction company. The company that owns ReelShorts is called Crazy Maple Studios. Before making vertical films, they made interactive chat stories adapted from serial fiction romance stories. And before that… well they were literally one of the largest web fiction platforms in all of China.

Vertical films as a genre is a direct evolution of serial fiction storytelling.

My last company (a software company for authors) had a huge focus on serials helping authors make $1 million+ a year serializing their work.

I know this market really well. And from personal experience, I can tell you SO many genres that would work on Kindle FLOPPED in the serial space.

Cozy mystery serials? Huge flop despite massive sales on Kindle.

Science fiction serials? If writing hard science fiction, good luck, also normally a flop.

What’s so magical about written stories are that there is so much of it in the world and it’s so cheap to produce (relative to video) that you can run tons of experiments very quickly (I’ve seen what this looks like at scale with a catalog of 10,000+ stories).

This type of genre expansion as described in ebook serial fiction was a failure. 

Does this mean that every serial fiction story is romance focused with a 90%+ female audience?

Absolutely not.

You’d be overlooking one of the hottest groups of genres in the storytelling world.

LitRPG (Literature Role Playing Games) and Progression Fantasy. These genres barely existed 10 years ago and are now $100M+ industries.

They have exploded on sites like Royal Road, well in excess of 10 million visits a month, and cater to a predominantly male audience reading on mobile devices. And the stories they are reading are in the same serial format that has made vertical films so popular.

Does this mean everyone should go make a FilmRPG or Progression Fantasy vertical?

No.

What it does mean is…

Takeaway #3: Putting your Viewers First means understanding what has and hasn’t worked before and using previous experiments to inform your next experiment. 

So do we need to bring more men into the vertical market?

No. We need to make stories viewers will love with viewer growth engines that we can use to reach them. More precisely we need to produce stories, formats, and production quality aligned with our viewer growth engine.

You must go into any story you make with a hypothesis, ideally backed up by previous research and experience, about why your story puts your viewers first… both in how you find viewers and in how viewers will feel about your story.

Sometimes that will mean running experiments that cater to a more male dominated audience. Sometimes it will lead to less.

But the first principle goal is to always put our Viewers First. And don’t let someone else’s notions of what they would want as a viewer stop you from sharing your story with the world, finding YOUR viewers, and making your idea of quality (or better put YOUR idea of qualia… the subjective experience of quality).

Yes, it’s that simple. And yes… it’s also that hard 😅.

Up until recently this kind of experimental approach to filmmaking and storytelling was impossible.

Production costs were fixed and so high that the only way to derisk it was to pay even more to get big stars and lean into a talent-led growth strategy.

With the Movie Machine bringing the cost of filmmaking down by 1,000x, new growth engines now become economical — such as paid ads and clipping (both of which I go into detail inside the Six Figure Film Accelerator).

And you don’t even need to make full productions. You can start with pilots, test if you get eyeballs and retention, and then double down from there (this is the strategy I share in detail inside the Creatorwood Bootcamp).

Lastly, you don’t have to go at this alone. The Movie Machine is an incredible software that makes it possible to upload a story and get a completed film with consistent characters, locations, and props all while giving you full control in the process.

But if you want to work with the best AI Directors in the world for a price 90% to 99%+ cheaper than traditional filmmaking, that’s exactly what we created our VIP Production Service. It’s a team of trained professionals who use the Movie Machine produce your pilot, proof of concept, full feature-length film, or even vertical 😉 all while you retain 100% of the rights, can distribute it anywhere, and get full creative control throughout the way.

We have different service options pending on your price point, you can learn more about them all HERE and schedule a free consultation call with our team HERE.

Yes, we have been working super hard to bring together a true full stack filmmaking service for you all, in addition to our software in the Movie Machine, that can help you all bring your stories to life whether you want to hire someone to do it for you or use the machine yourself. 

We’re super grateful for all your support. We’re at the beginning of a new industry. AI films are ready for market. At this time they won’t give you the fidelity and complex action scenes that you’d desire if playing at your local cinema on the MASSIVE screen. But for animations, kids content, verticals, Hallmark-like films, and tons and tons of films that serve the vast majority of a viewer’s content diet… AI films are ready to be created.

With Creatorwood now bringing costs down by a factor of 100x and sometimes 1,000x while maintaining a viable enough quality we are going to start to see huge changes in the entertainment industry.

We’re excited to be leading the charge with all of you.

And we are already rolling out ways that all creatives can win in this new future. Whether you are a storyteller, an actor, a film investor, a burgeoning AI director, or just someone with a passion and an idea for a story – we are creating a future where everyone can have power, agency, and an opportunity to make a living with no gatekeepers or massive barriers to entry.

Watch this space.

We call this new world Creatorwood. We’ll keep working harder and harder to make it a place where Storytellers Rule the World.

Michael and the Creatorwood Team