• By Nick Patel
• 01 Nov, 2026
• Industry

AI vs Live Action on the Vertical 52: What ReelShort’s Own Labels Show

By Nirav Patel, Founder, Vertical Charts

Two-thirds of the vertical dramas released outside China last quarter were made with AI. That’s the headline from Owl & Co.’s latest “What We Watched on Vertical” report, which The Hollywood Reporter covered on October 20. The consulting firm counted releases from 20 top platforms and found the AI share jumped from 3 percent in the first quarter of 2026 to 28 percent in the second and about 67 percent in the third. So we went back to our own chart and asked a narrower question: if most new shows are AI, how many of the shows people are actually watching right now are?

The answer, at least on ReelShort’s side of the Vertical 52 dated October 29, is far fewer than two-thirds.

How we counted

ReelShort labels AI-generated titles on its own show pages, and we store that label for every ReelShort title we track. That gives us a clean split without guessing from posters or trailers. Our DramaBox data doesn’t carry an equivalent label, so everything below covers ReelShort’s 26 chart titles only. VertiScore is our weekly score built from four signals: how fast a show is gaining plays (velocity), its total audience (reach), where the app itself is placing it (placement), and how often viewers save it. The methodology page has the details.

Five of 26

Only five of ReelShort’s 26 titles on this week’s chart carry the AI label, about 19 percent. They are Rejecting My Five Female Mates (#16), The Great and Powerful Genie (#20), The Alpha and His Nanny Luna (#45), My Cursed Merman Husband Rules the Deep (#46) and The Alpha’s Forbidden Bunny (#50). Every one is a fantasy or shifter premise: wolves, a genie, a merman. That fits what our Halloween guide found about where the supernatural lives on the chart.

The other 21 ReelShort titles are live action, and they hold the top four ReelShort slots: The Reckoning Takes Flight (#7, VertiScore 77.9), How to Dump a Hockey Star (#11, 75.1), Worth the Chase (#12, 74.4) and Agent of Shadows (#13, 72.8). On average the live-action group scores 63.9 against 61.4 for the AI group. Together the 21 live-action titles represent about 3.65 billion plays, roughly four times the 900 million for the five AI titles.

Part of the gap is simply that our chart rewards staying power, and AI titles are new. Among the roughly 74 ReelShort titles we track, none released before June 2026 is labeled AI. Of the 21 we track that came out in July, August and September, 11 are, just over half. That’s lower than Owl & Co.’s two-thirds across all platforms, which makes sense: we track the titles ReelShort promotes and viewers pick up, not every release. It still tells the same story. The AI wave is recent, and it hasn’t had time to pile up the reach that older live-action hits have.

The Genie problem

The one exception is the show Owl & Co. named the quarter’s top performer on paid apps by minutes watched: The Great and Powerful Genie, an AI series about a genie bound by a wish to marry a woman for five years. On our chart it has about 589 million plays, the second-largest audience of any ReelShort title on the Vertical 52 after Found A Homeless Billionaire Husband for Christmas at about 703 million. It got there in about 107 days, a fraction of the time the biggest live-action hits needed; the Christmas billionaire show has been out for nearly two years.

Yet it ranks only #20 with a VertiScore of 70.6. The reason shows up in placement. AI titles average just 30.9 on our placement signal, against 44.2 for live action, meaning ReelShort’s own shelves are giving them less prominent spots right now. Reach is also lower on average (57.9 versus 75.0), because four of the five AI titles are still small.

Where AI shows win: saves

The most surprising number runs the other way. Viewers save AI titles more often. The median save rate for the five AI shows is 1.41 percent of plays, against 0.95 percent for live action, and their average score on our save signal is 76.4 against 53.1. The tiny merman series saves at 2.6 percent, the highest rate on ReelShort’s half of the chart, though on fewer than half a million plays. Velocity, how fast plays are growing, is about even: 79.9 for AI and 78.3 for live action.

A save is a viewer bookmarking a show to come back to. A high save rate on a young show is a promise, not a result. Owl & Co.’s report hints at how that promise tends to play out: at ReelShort, live-action titles had a better chance of still being in the top 10 percent by views 30 days after release than AI titles did. Our numbers are consistent with that. AI shows hook a niche hard and fast. Live-action shows are the ones still sitting near the top a year or more after release, like The Reckoning Takes Flight and Undercover Prison King.

Live action is spending up

While the AI share climbs, ReelShort is pushing its live-action slate upmarket. Agent of Shadows, WWE’s first microdrama, premiered on October 23 with 72 episodes. Chase Mattson plays secret agent Adam Hawke and Drew McIntyre plays his tech expert, Roscoe, with Jacob Fatu, Joe Hendry, Nikkita Lyons, Michael Hayes and Booker T also appearing, according to Variety. “I started back when we were using iPhones, and now we’re using ARRIs and REDs,” Mattson told the outlet. The show debuted at #13 on our chart with about 10.3 million plays and a 1.25 percent save rate, and ReelShort has it near the top of its main shelf.

Worth the Chase, the second Wattpad adaptation, which we covered in our Worth the Chase analysis, landed one spot above it at #12. Both are live-action shows built on outside brands, a wrestling company and a webnovel platform, which is a very different bet from cheap AI volume.

What it means

For viewers, the quick test is still the app’s label: ReelShort tells you on the show page. For studios and advertisers, the takeaway is that release volume and chart presence are two different things. AI is already most of what gets made, and it has produced at least one genuine hit in The Great and Powerful Genie. But on ReelShort’s half of this week’s chart, live action still holds four out of five spots, the top four ReelShort positions and about 80 percent of the plays.

The other platforms matter here too. Owl & Co. put DramaBox at 36 percent of paid-app views in the third quarter, ahead of ReelShort at 29 percent, NetShort at 20 percent and DramaWave at 11 percent, and its top AI titles after the Genie were both DramaBox dragon series. We looked at how those apps compare in our app ranking. When DramaBox’s data gives us a clean AI label, we’ll run the same split on its half of the chart. Until then, we’ll keep tracking ReelShort’s share every Thursday. If the AI count on the chart starts climbing toward the release numbers, you’ll see it here first.