Vertical Documentaries, Franchises, and IPs: Where the Format Goes Next

At the APOS summit in June 2026, during the session Building the Vertical Stack in Asia, Timothy Oh, general manager and chief marketing officer of COL Group International, described the industry as entering a broader phase that extends well beyond microdramas. "Today we're already seeing the development of vertical documentaries, vertical IPs and vertical franchises," Oh said.

The statement was not a prediction. It was a description of things that had already happened in the weeks preceding it.

COL Group International and Bomanbridge Media had sealed a landmark co-production for the world's first premium, vertical-first documentary series, MAPOGO: The Lion Throne, set to premiere globally on FlareFlow in late Q3 2026. The FlareFlow partnership with Refinery Media had already expanded to include SupermodelMe: The Runway Kings, an all-male edition of the long-running reality franchise reimagined for vertical viewing. The vertical franchise era was not approaching. It had arrived.

Beatrice Lee, CEO of ROCK Networks, provided the commercial logic behind the move. "In the microdrama world, end users are highly engaged emotionally," Lee said. "That's what creates brand loyalty." The platform that creates brand loyalty around a property has something more durable than a top-performing series. It has an audience that returns. The transition from individual series to franchise is the transition from transactional content consumption to ongoing audience relationships.

According to Oh, the long-term goal is to create cultural moments around vertical content so as to keep audiences engaged beyond individual titles.

Cultural moments. Not individual titles. That phrase describes a fundamentally different commercial ambition from the coin-unlock series model the format built its initial success on. This is the complete breakdown of what that ambition looks like in production terms.

The Vertical Documentary: What MAPOGO Changes

The world's first premium vertical-first documentary launching on a major platform is not simply a new content category. It is proof of a production principle that the format's skeptics have questioned since its commercial emergence: that the vertical episode architecture can serve content whose emotional register is not manufactured through scripted power dynamics.

Timothy Oh noted: vertical storytelling has already entered its next chapter. MAPOGO: The Lion Throne is the perfect story to launch documentary as part of Vertical 2.0 because its emotional DNA already mirrors the very best premium scripted storytelling. This is one of wildlife's most legendary true sagas, packed with all the betrayal, power, loss and suspense that vertical audiences connect with instinctively.

The description of MAPOGO's emotional DNA is the key to understanding why this specific documentary works as a vertical format entry point. The Mapogo Lion Coalition's story is not a wildlife observation series. It is a power dynamics story, a dominance arc, a betrayal narrative, and a rise-and-fall structure. The same emotional architecture that makes a billionaire romance series convert at the paywall is present in the story of five lions who ruled a game reserve through force and were eventually overthrown.

The insight is generalizable: documentary content that has scripted drama's emotional architecture, specifically power dynamics, betrayal, status competition, and rise-and-fall arcs, translates to vertical format regardless of whether the characters are humans or lions, real events or fictional ones. The format does not require scripted content. It requires emotional architecture.

The production challenge for vertical documentary is specific. Unlike scripted drama, documentary footage is captured rather than constructed. The episode-end cliffhanger that scripted drama engineers at the script stage has to be identified in existing footage and structured through editing. The wildlife documentary that spent years filming the Mapogo Coalition has the dramatic events. The vertical adaptation requires finding the edit that structures those events into 90-second episodes with correct hook-to-button mechanics.

MAPOGO's use of Sam Myerson as narrator is strategically interesting. Myerson, fresh off his hit performance in the viral sensation Oops, I Married My Bestie's Brother, which garnered a record 220 million views in only 10 days, said: narrating MAPOGO is an incredible opportunity to show how the core elements of a great microdrama are entirely universal. Bringing a vertical drama personality to a wildlife documentary is not casting based on wildlife expertise. It is audience bridging: the existing vertical drama audience's parasocial relationship with Myerson makes them more likely to try a documentary format they might not otherwise engage with.

The Vertical Franchise: Beyond Sequels

Vertical series are being treated as a new R&D lab for IP, talent, and format innovation. A short vertical series might introduce characters or locations that later appear in games, films, or longer series. Brand and IP extensions, where broadcasters, streamers, and franchises use vertical series as an on-ramp or side-story for existing shows.

The franchise model that vertical drama is entering is not the sequel model the format has been building toward through productions like Bound by Honor and Bound by Love. It is a more complex IP architecture where vertical drama is one format lane within a multi-format property, rather than a standalone series universe.

The Neymar vertical drama announcement at APOS provides the clearest example of this architecture. The economics behind it matter. COL's net loss widened roughly 50% year-over-year in H1 2025, driven by overseas marketing costs. A 16-title franchise at live-action budget would be untenable; AI production is what makes the slate financially viable. The World Cup timing is the reach vehicle; Neymar's 220 million-plus social following is the conversion argument. Whether the genre's established melodrama conventions translate to a sports-motivated male viewer is a question this franchise will answer in real time. The first attempt to engineer a male vertical drama audience at scale — and a live test of whether AI production can absorb the cost of a celebrity IP play that traditional budgets could not justify.

The Neymar franchise is explicitly using a World Cup cultural moment to drive vertical drama consumption among a demographic the format has not previously served at scale: male sports fans. That audience development experiment is only financially viable because AI production compresses the cost of a 16-title franchise to a level that the celebrity IP play's reach justifies. Traditional production budgets could not absorb the cost-to-reach ratio.

The IP Extension Model: Vertical as Entry Point

Vertical drama is a powerful test bed for characters, worlds, and tonal swings that you might later expand into premium series, films, concert documentaries, or live specials.

This is the IP development model that changes vertical drama's relationship with the broader entertainment industry. Rather than treating vertical drama as a standalone commercial format, the IP extension model treats it as the cheapest and fastest entry point for testing whether an IP concept has audience appeal before committing larger format investment.

The logic is specific: a vertical drama series at $60,000 to $100,000 generates real performance data, paywall conversion rates, episode completion data, and subscriber retention, before committing $2 million to a feature film or streaming pilot. The concept that converts at 12% in a vertical drama series has demonstrated audience demand that the premium format investment can be built on. The concept that converts at 2% has demonstrated that the IP direction needs adjustment before the larger investment is made.

Vertical series let you test new IP and talent quickly, cheaply, and with real-world data. Build bridges between live events, documentaries, and audiences living on their phones. You're also working in a format where data feedback is brutally fast. Watch-through rates, drop-off points, and replay loops tell you which beats are working almost in real time, letting you refine scripts and performance with a level of granularity that long-form rarely allows.

For studios and production companies that have been treating vertical drama as a peripheral format, the IP extension model reframes it as the most cost-efficient development tool available. The vertical drama series is not the end product. It is the market research with entertainment value that determines whether the end product is worth building.

The Sports and Celebrity IP Frontier

The Neymar announcement and the broader APOS deal week reveal a specific IP category that vertical drama is beginning to systematically enter: sports and celebrity IP.

APOS 2026 produced the week's densest concentration of vertical drama deal-making — ReelShort, COL Group, Viu, and iQIYI all moved simultaneously in Southeast Asia and Korea.

Sports IP has specific structural advantages for vertical drama adaptation. The competitive structure of sports generates regular high-stakes resolution events, which are natural episode content. The parasocial relationships sports audiences develop with athletes are the same emotional investment mechanics that vertical drama's retention model depends on. The global reach of major sports IP bypasses the cultural localization problem that most content faces in international markets.

The challenge: sports IP content that dramatizes real competitive outcomes cannot engineer its emotional highs and lows the way scripted drama can. The vertical sports drama that depends on real match results for its tension peaks will have episodes where the tension is not structurally optimal for the format's conversion mechanics. The adaptation requires deciding whether to dramatize the actual competitive story or to use the athlete's celebrity and the sports IP's cultural recognition as the context for a fictional dramatic narrative.

The Neymar slate's approach to this question will be the most commercially instructive test of sports IP in vertical drama that the format has seen at this scale.

The Audience Loyalty Question

Beatrice Lee, CEO of ROCK Networks, echoed the importance of audience relationships, pointing out that microdrama viewers demonstrate unusually high levels of engagement. "In the microdrama world, end users are highly engaged emotionally," Lee said. "That's what creates brand loyalty."

The transition from individual series to franchise is fundamentally a transition from transaction-based engagement to relationship-based engagement. The viewer who watches one series and never returns is a coin-unlock transaction. The viewer who watches every series in a franchise, returns for each new season, follows the franchise's talent across productions, and advocates for the franchise within their social network is an audience relationship.

The coin-unlock model captures transaction value well. It captures relationship value poorly. A subscriber who completes a 70-episode series on ReelShort and finds no sequel, no spin-off, and no related content to extend the relationship with is a subscriber whose engagement cycle has ended. The platform has to re-engage that subscriber with a new series, investing user acquisition cost equivalent to a new acquisition.

The franchise model captures relationship value by keeping the subscriber engaged with existing IP. The viewer who completes Bound by Honor knows that Bound by Love exists. The viewer who completes SupermodelMe: Make It or Break It knows that SupermodelMe: The Runway Kings is coming. The subscriber churn that the coin-unlock model fights through constant new series acquisition is replaced by franchise loyalty that sustains engagement between productions without requiring new acquisition spend.

Lee separately disclosed that nearly 20 percent of Viu's existing long-form user base already consumes Viu Shorts — a format launched only months ago. That figure is the deal's most significant data point: users already paying for long-form content will consume vertical drama without additional friction when it is embedded in the same interface.

The 20% crossover figure from Viu is the most commercially significant audience loyalty data point from APOS week. It suggests that the audience for vertical drama is not a separate population from the audience for conventional streaming. It is a subset of the same audience, already paying for entertainment, who will consume vertical drama in addition to long-form content when the format is accessible within their existing platform relationship.

The Vertical 2.0 Framework

Timothy Oh noted: MAPOGO: The Lion Throne marks the next phase of FlareFlow's Vertical 2.0 strategy to raise new standards of microdrama and their potential. With more than 33 million registered users across 200 countries and territories, and over 5,200 series released, FlareFlow continues to scale as one of the world's fastest growing vertical entertainment platforms.

Vertical 2.0 is COL Group's explicit framing for the format's current evolution. Vertical 1.0 was the scripted romance and revenge arc model that established the format's commercial viability. Vertical 2.0 is the expansion into documentary, reality, sports IP, celebrity IP, and multi-format franchise architecture that COL Group is executing across its FlareFlow platform through 2026.

COL Group is a China-listed digital entertainment powerhouse with more than two decades of experience in content development, distribution, and IP management. As the first company to pioneer and launch the microdrama format in China, it helped define a new category of short-form storytelling before launching FlareFlow to scale its global ecosystem. Timothy Oh said: we see this partnership as a powerful vehicle to drive our Vertical 2.0 strategy by bringing next-generation, premium brand-funded stories to audiences in the region in a way that respects both the creative craft and the massive commercial opportunity.

The Vertical 2.0 framework is the most useful operating concept for understanding where the format is going. It is not replacing Vertical 1.0. The scripted romance and revenge arc model continues to generate the majority of the format's commercial volume. Vertical 2.0 is the expansion layer that builds on the format's established audience base and commercial infrastructure to serve content categories that require different production approaches and generate different audience relationships.

What It Means for Production Companies

The Vertical 2.0 expansion creates specific commercial opportunities for production companies that the scripted-only format did not offer.

Documentary and factual production companies with existing IP libraries now have a vertical distribution path for content that the dedicated vertical drama apps previously had no mechanism to acquire. A wildlife documentary production company with 200 hours of footage in archive has potential vertical episode content in that archive if the footage contains the emotional architecture the format requires.

Sports rights holders and celebrity IP managers have a new content format for audience development. The sports franchise model that the Neymar slate is testing at scale provides a commercial template for how sports IP generates vertical drama revenue alongside its existing media rights monetization.

Long-form production companies with existing IP have a vertical drama entry point for franchise extension. The drama series that has been distributed through conventional streaming can extend into vertical drama as a companion format, testing new character configurations, new story arcs, and new demographic targets at vertical drama cost before committing conventional production budget.

For producers who already juggle talent, rights, and complex schedules, there's a clear gap: partners who can treat these projects with the same professionalism as a broadcast show, while still moving at creator speed. That's where experience in live, doc, and reality formats becomes a competitive edge.

The production companies that already have experience across formats, not only in scripted vertical drama, are positioned to serve the Vertical 2.0 expansion in ways that pure vertical drama production companies cannot. The documentary producer who understands the vertical episode architecture has a skill set the format needs that it cannot yet supply from within its own production community.

Axis AI Studios Perspective

The format's expansion into documentary, reality, franchise, and sports IP is the commercial development that changes vertical drama from a niche mobile content category into a format layer that sits across the full entertainment content stack.

Karen Seah, founder and CEO of Refinery Media, shared that successful vertical content requires stories that are immediately understandable while delivering a fresh emotional hook in every episode to build intimacy with viewers.

That production requirement, immediately understandable stories with a fresh emotional hook in every episode, is constant across all of Vertical 2.0's content categories. The scripted series that delivers it in episode one of a billionaire romance and the wildlife documentary that delivers it in episode one of the Mapogo Lion Coalition's rise to dominance are both succeeding on the same terms.

At Axis AI Studios, the Vertical 2.0 expansion validates the production philosophy we have been building toward: the format's commercial mechanics are universal, and the content categories that can serve those mechanics are much broader than the scripted romance and revenge arc genres the format built its initial success on. AI-native production provides the cost efficiency that makes Vertical 2.0's wider content category ambitions financially viable at scales that conventional production cannot support.

For production companies, IP holders, and brand partners who want to understand how their specific content assets translate to Vertical 2.0's expanded format landscape, reach out at business@axisaistudios.com.

FAQ

What Is Vertical 2.0?

Vertical 2.0 is COL Group's framing for the current phase of the format's development, in which the content categories served by the vertical episode architecture expand beyond scripted romance and revenge arcs into documentary, reality, sports IP, celebrity IP, and multi-format franchise architecture. The production requirements and commercial mechanics of the vertical format remain constant across all content categories. What changes is which IP and production approaches can serve those mechanics.

What Makes a Documentary Suitable for Vertical Adaptation?

The emotional architecture of the documentary's subject matter determines its vertical viability. Documentaries that contain power dynamics, status competition, rise-and-fall arcs, and betrayal or reversal events have the structural material that vertical episode architecture requires. MAPOGO works because the Mapogo Lion Coalition's story contains dominance, rivalry, betrayal, and tragic fall in a real-world narrative. A documentary series about architectural history or agricultural science contains none of these structural elements and would require fundamental reframing to produce vertical content with correct hook-to-button mechanics.

How Does AI Production Change the Economics of Vertical Franchise Development?

AI production compresses the per-series cost of franchise development to a level that makes multi-title franchise slates financially viable. A 16-title sports franchise at live-action production costs would require financing that most IP deals cannot justify. The same slate at AI-native production costs produces a cost-to-reach ratio that celebrity and sports IP's audience scale can support. The franchise model that creates cultural moments and audience loyalty requires volume content to sustain engagement between flagship productions. AI production is the economic mechanism that makes that volume viable.

Further Reading

For how the reality franchise category that Vertical 2.0 is developing relates to the SupermodelMe deal that preceded Oh's APOS statement, the guide to what SupermodelMe's adaptation tells us about the format's next phase covers the first major reality franchise adapted for vertical and what it opened.

For how brand integration fits within the Vertical 2.0 strategy that COL Group and Refinery Media are executing through their Shopee and Nippon Paint partnerships, the guide to how brands can use vertical drama as a content marketing strategy covers the brand integration models that the Vertical 2.0 commercial framework is built around.

For how to maintain brand and IP consistency across the franchise architecture that Vertical 2.0 requires, the guide to maintaining brand consistency across a vertical drama franchise covers character look, tone, visual identity, and audience expectation management across sequels, spin-offs, and related content.