Vertical Reality: What SupermodelMe's Adaptation Tells Us About the Format's Next Phase

In March 2026, at Hong Kong FilMart, COL Group International and Refinery Media announced that SupermodelMe would become the world's first major reality franchise adapted as a vertical micro-series. The new series, titled SupermodelMe: Make It or Break It, will premiere on COL's global mobile platform FlareFlow, marking the first time an established reality IP has been fully retooled for mobile-native, vertical-format episodic storytelling at this scale.

By June 2026, the partnership had already expanded. At the Asia Pacific Video Advancement Leaders summit, COL Group International and Refinery Media announced the next evolution: SupermodelMe: The Runway Kings, the first-ever all-male competition format in the brand's 17-year history, scheduled to debut on FlareFlow in Q4 2026.

The speed of that expansion is the most commercially significant detail in the announcement. Not the franchise title. Not the platform. The pace at which a deal announced at FilMart in March produced a sequel format by June reveals that this is not an experiment. It is a production model operating at vertical drama's native speed, applied to an IP category that the format has never previously touched.

That matters far beyond SupermodelMe itself.

What the Deal Actually Is

Created and owned by Refinery Media, SupermodelMe ran for six seasons, including an international run on Netflix, and built a following that positioned it as one of the most recognizable modelling competition brands to emerge from Asia.

The franchise brings three things to this deal that most vertical drama IP does not have: an established audience that already knows the format, recognizable talent in returning host Cindy Bishop and judge Ase Wang, and a brand identity built across 17 years of production. These are assets that original vertical drama IP has to build from zero.

The platform brings three things the franchise could not provide independently: FlareFlow claimed the top spot on US entertainment app charts last September and has since grown to 33 million registered users across more than 200 countries and regions, with support for 14 languages and approximately 5,200 series released to date. That distribution infrastructure moves the franchise in front of a mobile-first audience it could not reach through conventional television distribution.

The English-language focus is deliberate. Southeast Asia remains underserved by premium vertical content in English, while US audiences are actively seeking alternatives to the Chinese-language titles that have dominated the vertical market to date.

The deal is not adapting SupermodelMe for vertical drama as a distribution experiment. It is using SupermodelMe as the flagship title in a full slate strategy. Beyond the flagship title, the deal also encompasses three additional Singapore-produced vertical series from Refinery Media: No-Volley Zone, My Best Friend, My Brother, My Rival and The Housemaid Wife, all set to premiere on FlareFlow.

Why Unscripted Vertical Is Structurally Different

Vertical drama built its commercial model on scripted romance and revenge arcs because the format's episode architecture, 60 to 90 seconds with a cliffhanger cut, maps cleanly onto the escalating tension mechanics that scripted drama uses. Every episode is a controlled construction. The writer decides what happens. The director stages it. The editor cuts before the tension releases. The conversion mechanics are engineered.

Unscripted reality content does not work that way. Competition formats, documentary series, and reality franchises generate their tension from real outcomes that the production cannot guarantee in advance. A contestant who does not deliver drama in a particular episode cannot be rewritten. A competition result that resolves cleanly rather than tensely cannot be restructured by the editor.

Adapting SupermodelMe for vertical format therefore requires solving a production problem that scripted vertical drama does not face: how do you produce 90-second episodes with guaranteed cliffhanger tension from footage that is generated by real people making real decisions?

Karen Seah, founder and CEO of Refinery Media, said: SupermodelMe has always embraced reinvention. From its early beginnings as an online-only series, evolving into traditional long-form television, and now reimagined for vertical storytelling, each chapter has brought the franchise closer to its audience. This partnership allows us to demonstrate how unscripted formats can successfully adapt to vertical storytelling, opening the door for a new wave of micro entertainment.

The phrase "reimagined for vertical storytelling" rather than "adapted for vertical distribution" is the key. The production is not taking long-form reality footage and cutting it into short clips. It is reimagining the format's production structure to generate the episode architecture that vertical requires. That is a different and more complex production problem, and the fact that Refinery Media is solving it at series scale is the development that matters for everyone else watching this deal.

The Production Architecture of Vertical Reality

The modelling competition format has inherent vertical drama advantages that not all reality genres share.

Competition structures generate elimination events. An elimination at the end of a competition cycle is a natural episode cut point with unresolved tension: the contestant does not know until the next episode whether they are safe. The competition reality genre's existing architecture maps onto the vertical episode structure more naturally than documentary or lifestyle reality.

The close-up visual register of vertical drama serves competition reality well. Fashion, modelling, and performance competition formats are built around physical evaluation of individuals. The 9:16 close-up frame, which places the camera directly on a person's face and body in the frame's primary zone, is exactly the visual register that competition reality requires to communicate the subject's quality, confidence, or vulnerability to the audience.

The emotional stakes in competition reality are real. A contestant who genuinely does not know whether they will be eliminated is experiencing real fear. The 9:16 close-up captures that emotional reality in the same register that scripted vertical drama constructs through performance direction. The camera reads real emotions in close-up the same way it reads performed emotions. The reality format gets the emotional register for free.

What the production team has to engineer is the episode-level cliffhanger that vertical drama's conversion mechanics require. A competition episode that ends on a completed elimination provides no carry-forward tension. A competition episode that ends at the moment the elimination decision is about to be announced, with the cut landing before the result is revealed, creates the same conversion pressure that a scripted paywall episode creates. The engineering challenge is structuring the competition's event sequence so that natural episode cut points fall at maximum unresolved tension rather than at resolution moments.

The Broader Signal: IP Categories Now Available for Vertical

The adaptation expands vertical storytelling beyond scripted romance-driven narratives, introducing reality and competition-based formats into the ecosystem. It also reflects a growing interest in leveraging existing IP libraries for new distribution environments. Vertical is expanding into unscripted and format-based content, opening the door for traditional IP owners to repackage franchises for mobile-first audiences.

That observation from Real Reel's FilMart coverage is the most commercially significant sentence written about the SupermodelMe deal. It does not describe what SupermodelMe is. It describes what SupermodelMe opens.

The IP categories that the SupermodelMe model now makes available for vertical adaptation:

Competition and talent formats. Modelling, cooking, singing, dancing, business pitching, any format where regular elimination events generate natural cliffhanger structures and where close-up visual evaluation of individuals is the primary storytelling mode.

Aspirational lifestyle formats. Home renovation, fashion, travel, wellness. These formats generate aspirational visual content in the environments that vertical drama's core demographic responds to. The production challenge is generating per-episode narrative tension rather than per-episode information delivery.

Drama-adjacent reality. Dating competition formats, relationship experiment formats, social experiment formats. These reality categories already operate on the emotional mechanics that vertical drama uses: power dynamics, concealment and revelation, status competition, and romantic tension. The scripted-reality distinction is thinner in these formats than in competition or documentary reality.

Documentary series around recognizable personalities. The celebrity documentary format, which has generated significant streaming engagement on conventional platforms, maps onto vertical if the episode architecture is built around revelation and tension rather than information and access.

What Refinery Media's Approach Adds: Brand Integration at Architecture Level

The SupermodelMe deal is not Refinery Media's only significant signal about where vertical is heading. Across the slate, Shopee and Nippon Paint have signed on as brand partners, signalling a deeper integration model where commercial partnerships are built into the narrative structure rather than layered in post-production.

Refinery Media said: we're not treating brand integration as an add-on. Our approach embeds brand narratives into story architecture from day one, so the integration becomes indistinguishable from the content itself. That's what we're bringing to vertical.

This is the commercial model that makes the unscripted vertical format viable beyond platform acquisition fees. A reality competition format with brand integration built into its production architecture generates revenue from brand partnerships in addition to platform licensing, which changes the economics of unscripted vertical production relative to scripted.

Scripted vertical drama can integrate brands, but the integration requires rewriting scenes around the brand's presence. Unscripted reality competition can integrate brands as competition sponsors, judging criteria, and challenge frameworks without requiring any script modification. The integration is structural rather than decorative. A fashion competition where the brand's product is the challenge vehicle is a format that the brand helps fund because the brand's commercial objective and the format's narrative objective are the same thing.

What This Means for COL Group and the Platform Landscape

COL Group's Timothy Oh stated: today we're already seeing the development of vertical documentaries, vertical IPs and vertical franchises. The long-term goal is to create cultural moments around vertical content so as to keep audiences engaged beyond individual titles.

The phrase "cultural moments" is the key commercial objective behind the SupermodelMe deal. The vertical drama format's current commercial model is built on individual series performance: a series converts at the paywall, subscribers watch it, the platform's revenue model captures that conversion, the series' value ends when its viewing cycle completes.

A franchise creates something different: an ongoing audience relationship with a property that extends across multiple seasons, multiple format variants, and potentially across format categories. The audience that watches SupermodelMe: Make It or Break It and then SupermodelMe: The Runway Kings has a franchise relationship, not a series relationship. That franchise relationship is more durable than per-series viewer engagement and more valuable to the platform's subscriber retention economics.

COL Group's platform strategy is evolving from catalog depth, the 5,200 series FlareFlow has released, toward franchise architecture. The platform that creates a culture moment around SupermodelMe has an audience that is waiting for the next edition rather than scrolling for the next series.

That shift from catalog to franchise is the most significant strategic development in the vertical drama platform market that the SupermodelMe deal signals.

What It Means for Independent Production Companies

The SupermodelMe deal opens two specific commercial opportunities for independent production companies that the scripted-only vertical market did not offer.

The first is the unscripted vertical production service market. The deal marks the first time an established reality IP has been fully reengineered for mobile-first episodic storytelling. Production companies that can solve the structural challenge of engineering vertical episode architecture from unscripted reality footage are entering a market that has almost no established competition. The production skills required, understanding vertical episode mechanics, building cliffhanger cut structures from real event sequences, and calibrating close-up visual storytelling for the phone display, are skills that vertical drama production has developed and that conventional reality production has not.

The second is the IP licensing opportunity for unscripted format holders. Publishers, format owners, and rights holders sitting on reality formats that have previously been distributed through conventional television channels now have a new distribution path. An established competition format with recognizable IP, a clear audience demographic, and a competition structure that generates regular elimination events has the raw materials for vertical adaptation. The production challenge is real but solvable. The distribution opportunity, through platforms like FlareFlow that have 33 million registered users across 200 countries, is immediate.

Axis AI Studios Perspective

The SupermodelMe deal is the clearest signal yet that vertical drama has moved past the phase where the format was defined by its dominant genre category and into the phase where the format is defined by its production architecture.

The architecture, 90-second episodes with engineered cliffhanger cuts, coin-unlock paywall conversion, mobile-calibrated production standards, is the constant. The content category that architecture serves is expanding: scripted romance, revenge arcs, supernatural content, thriller, family drama, and now unscripted reality competition. The common factor is not the genre. It is the mobile-first audience, the episode architecture, and the commercial model.

For production companies and IP holders evaluating vertical drama, the SupermodelMe deal changes the question from "does my IP fit the vertical drama genre?" to "does my IP have the structural elements that vertical episode architecture can serve?" Competition formats with regular elimination events do. Aspirational lifestyle formats with progression narratives do. Relationship and social experiment formats do.

The formats that do not translate are the ones where the value is information, access, or long-form characterization that the 90-second episode cannot deliver. The formats that do translate are the ones where the value is tension, competition, revelation, and emotional stakes at the episode level.

That is a larger category than "billionaire romance."

For production companies and IP holders who want to evaluate whether their existing IP has vertical adaptation potential, or who want to commission vertical content across scripted or unscripted categories, reach out at business@axisaistudios.com.

FAQ

Why Is SupermodelMe Significant Beyond Being a Single Reality Show?

It is the proof of concept for an entirely new content category in vertical drama. Before SupermodelMe, the format's commercial model was built on scripted romance and revenge arcs. The SupermodelMe deal demonstrates that the vertical episode architecture can serve unscripted reality competition formats, which opens the format to every established reality IP holder, every competition format owner, and every production company with unscripted production capability. The significance is not the show. It is the category it opens.

What Makes a Reality Format Suitable for Vertical Adaptation?

Three structural elements increase a reality format's vertical adaptation viability: regular elimination or revelation events that provide natural cliffhanger cut points, a close-up visual evaluation component where individual performance is assessed in the frame's primary zone, and emotional stakes that are genuine rather than constructed. Competition formats, talent formats, and relationship experiment formats have all three. Documentary formats and information-led lifestyle formats typically have fewer of these structural elements and require more significant production reengineering.

Does the Unscripted Vertical Format Use the Same Paywall Mechanics as Scripted?

The paywall mechanics are the same in principle but different in execution. Scripted vertical drama engineers the paywall cut at the script stage. Unscripted vertical reality engineers the paywall cut at the shooting and editing stage, by structuring production so that the competition's key decision moments fall near the episode cut point and by cutting the episode before the decision is revealed. The conversion mechanism is identical: the viewer is at maximum unresolved tension at the moment the episode ends, and paying to unlock the next episode is the only way to resolve that tension.

Further Reading

For the format experiments across scripted vertical that the unscripted category expansion described in this post sits alongside, the format experiments to watch in vertical drama right now covers interactive, musical, and genre-hybrid experiments and what each signals about the format's development.

For how brands can integrate into vertical drama production as the Refinery Media model demonstrates, the guide to how brands can use vertical drama as a content marketing strategy covers brand integration models and the production economics that make them viable.

For the IP licensing framework that governs how established formats like SupermodelMe are structured for vertical adaptation deals, the IP licensing guide for vertical drama adaptation covers territory rights, derivative rights, and the deal frameworks that franchise IP requires.