纽约时报中文网 - 中英对照版-中英微短剧爆火拥有中国血统的ReelShort能征服美国吗
February 1, 2024 6 min 1255 words
这篇报道介绍了ReelShort这款手机应用，以及其在美国市场上取得的成功。该应用提供了一种全新的微短剧体验，通过吸引女性观众，以简单而具有情节的方式迅速吸引用户。相较于Quibi的失败，ReelShort聚焦在肥皂剧式内容上，成功利用了亚太地区在疫情期间流行的极短剧情形式。文章中提到，ReelShort的成功是通过低成本制作、小团队合作和迎合女性肥皂剧爱好者的独特模式取得的。 ReelShort在中国公司Crazy Maple Studio的支持下，正尝试在美国市场复制其在国外建立的成功模式。与其他短视频应用不同，ReelShort的商业模式注重迅速吸引用户，通过短期内提供令人着迷的情节，以“现收现付”的方式获取利润。文章还提到，尽管ReelShort与TikTok等应用存在竞争关系，但由于其专注于微短剧内容，目标受众是喜欢肥皂剧的女性，因此在市场上形成了一种差异化。 总体而言，ReelShort在短时间内在美国市场上取得了巨大成功，其独特的商业模式和对受众需求的敏感使其在激烈的竞争中脱颖而出。这也引发了对微短剧在未来娱乐产业中的潜在影响和发展趋势的关注。
When Albee Zhang received an offer to produce cheesy short-form features made for phones last spring, she was skeptical, and so, she declined.
去年春天，当艾碧·张（音）收到邀请，让她为在手机上看的俗套短片当制片人时，她持怀疑态度，因此拒绝了。
But the offers kept coming. Finally, Ms. Zhang, who has been a producer for 12 years, realized it could be a profitable new way of storytelling and said yes.
但这种邀请没完没了。最终，已经当了12年制片人的张女士意识到，这种讲故事的新方式可能有利可图，所以接受了邀请。
Since last summer, she has produced two short-form features and is working on four more for several apps that are creating cookie-cutter content aimed at women.
自去年夏天起，她已制作了两部单集微短剧，并正在为几款应用程序创作针对女性观众、内容千篇一律的内容。
Think: Lifetime movie cut up into TikTok videos. Think: soap opera, but for the short attention span of the internet age.
这种微短剧像是把有关人生的电影剪辑成TikTok短视频，或是为注意力短暂的互联网时代制作的肥皂剧。
The biggest player in this new genre is ReelShort, an app that offers melodramatic content in minute-long, vertically shot episodes and is hoping to bring a successful formula established abroad to the United States by hooking millions of people on its short-form content.
这种新剧种的最大参与者是ReelShort，这款手机应用为用户提供每集最长几分钟、竖屏画面的情节剧内容，并希望通过吸引数百万美国人观看短剧内容，把在国外建立的成功模式引入美国。
ReelShort is owned by Crazy Maple Studio, a company in Northern California that is backed by the Beijing-based digital publisher COL Group.
ReelShort的所有者是总部设在加利福尼亚州北部的Crazy Maple Studio，其背后有中国数字出版商中文在线集团的支持。
ReelShort’s 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 plotlines include romance and revenge, the characters are archetypical and the dialogues are simple.
ReelShort制作的微短剧包括《亿万富翁丈夫的双重生活》(The Double Life of My Billionaire Husband)、《没你我也能嫁人》(I Got Married Without You)，以及《仇杀之缚：与敌同眠》(Bound by Vendetta: Sleeping With the Enemy)。这些短剧很公式化，情节包括浪漫与复仇，有典型的人物和简单的对话。
The extremely short genre became popular in the Asia-Pacific region during the pandemic, and Joey Jia, the chief executive of Crazy Maple Studio, took notice.
微短剧是新冠病毒大流行期间在亚太地区火起来的，Crazy Maple Studio的首席执行官贾毅注意到了这点。
ReelShort aims to get people hooked as quickly as possible, with much of the action happening 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 leave.”
ReelShort力求让人们尽快上瘾，大部分情节都发生在微短剧的前几集里。“这是个现收现付的模式，”贾毅说。“如果故事把人们弄糊涂了，他们就不会看下去了。”
The cost of making these features is relatively low, $300,000 or less, according to Crazy Maple Studios. The crews are small and partly made up of recent film graduates in Los Angeles, according to actors who worked on the productions.
据Crazy Maple Studios称，制作这些微短剧的成本相对较低，只需30万美元或更少。据参与制作的演员说，剧组规模不大，其中一些人是住在洛杉矶的电影专业近期毕业生。
Viewers can watch dozens of minute-long episodes on ReelShort for free via multiple platforms, including YouTube and TikTok. But at some point, they must either pay or watch ads to unlock subsequent episodes.
人们可以在YouTube和TikTok等多个平台上免费看到ReelShort提供的十几段一分钟长的剧集。但看了前几集后，他们需要付费或看广告才能看到后面发生的事情。
Sometimes people pay as much as $10 or $20 to keep watching, Ms. Zhang, the producer, said. “Isn’t that a crazy business?”
制片人艾碧·张说，有时人们会花10或20美元一直看下去。“这笔生意有点不可思议，不是吗？”
In December, Mr. Jia told The Wall Street Journal that the company had already made $22 million in revenue.
贾毅去年12月对《华尔街日报》说，他的公司已取得了 2200万美元的收入。
In the United States, ReelShort is trying to succeed where the short-form content company Quibi failed. Quibi launched in early 2020 and shut down that same year, partly because of what its founder Jeffrey Katzenberg called bad timing: The app offered five- to 10-minute videos of news and entertainment for people on the go, right as people stopped going anywhere because of pandemic lockdowns.
And while Quibi focused on more highbrow content with A-list stars, ReelShort is doing the opposite: It’s giving people juicy plot points, from werewolves to evil step mothers to secret billionaire husbands to more werewolves.
Quibi曾将注意力集中在有一线明星参与的格调高雅的内容上，但ReelShort正在反其道而行之：它为人们提供刺激的情节，从传说中的狼人到邪恶的继母，再到行动诡秘的亿万富翁丈夫和更多的狼人。
“We learned a lot from Quibi,” said Mr. Jia, the Crazy Maple Studio executive. ReelShort isn’t trying to appeal to everyone, like Quibi tried to do, he added.
“我们从Quibi学到了很多东西，”贾毅说道。他还表示，ReelShort无意像Quibi那样试图吸引所有人。
“To build a successful mobile app, you need to find out your core audience,” he said. And that audience is women who love soap operas. (ReelShort’s audience is roughly 75 percent female, Mr. Jia said.)
“要打造一款成功的移动应用程序，你需要找到你的核心受众，”他说。那个受众是喜欢肥皂剧的女性。（贾毅说，ReelShort的观众中约75%是女性。）
Mr. Jia said he wasn’t trying to compete with streamers like Netflix. If you’re free to sit on your couch for a few hours, ReelShort is probably not the app you’re opening. It’s for those in-between moments: at a bus stop, in the bathroom.
贾毅表示，他不想与网飞等流媒体公司竞争。如果你有时间在沙发上坐几个小时的话，ReelShort大概不是你会打开的应用。这款应用适合于那些“当中”时刻：在车站等公交车时，上卫生间时。
“We are using a very different business model,” Mr. Jia said, “and serving a different time.”
“我们采用的是一种非常不同的商业模式，”贾毅说，“服务的也是一个不同的时间段。”
ReelShort is hardly the first app owned or partly 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 in recent months in Apple’s American app store.
ReelShort远非第一个由中国公司拥有或部分拥有，并在美国取得突破的应用程序。TikTok以及购物应用Shein和Temu都是近几个月来在苹果的美国应用商店下载量最高的应用。
But for TikTok, which is owned by the Chinese company ByteDance, this has been problematic. Lawmakers in the United States, Europe and Canada have expressed concerns that TikTok and its parent company may 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 has not faced the same kind of pressure.
但对被中国母公司字节跳动拥有的TikTok来说，这一直是个问题。美国、欧洲和加拿大的立法者已对TikTok及其母公司可能会将用户的敏感个人信息交给中国政府表示了担忧，并试图限制人们使用这款广受欢迎的应用程序。ReelShort尚未面临同样的压力。
Last month, ReelShort was downloaded one million times and earned $5 million in revenue in Apple’s app store, according to the data firm Sensor Tower, and it was downloaded three million times in the Google Play Store, earning $3 million in revenue there. Since November, ReelShort has ranked somewhere in the top 15 of most popular entertainment apps in both app stores on most days. (For a few days in November, ReelShort even surpassed TikTok as the most popular entertainment app in Apple’s app store.)
据数据公司Sensor Tower，上个月，ReelShort在苹果应用商店的下载量达到了100万次，收入达500万美元；在Google Play商店的下载量达到了300万次，收入达300万美元。在去年11月以来的大多数日子里，ReelShort在这两家应用商店的最受欢迎娱乐应用程序排名中都位居前15名。（在去年11月，ReelShort在苹果应用商店最受欢迎的娱乐应用排名中，曾有数天超过了TikTok。）
In total, more than seven million people downloaded ReelShort in the United States in 2023, on Apple and Android phones combined, according to data.ai. Worldwide, there were more than 24 million downloads last year. After the United States, India is ReelShort’s next-largest market, followed by the Philippines.
据data.ai的数据，2023年，美国总共有逾700万人在Apple手机或Android手机上下载了ReelShort。去年，它的全球下载量超过了2400万次。印度是继美国之后ReelShort的第二大市场，第三是菲律宾。
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 drew a comparison to channels with made-for-TV content, such as Hallmark.
家住洛杉矶的演员凯西·埃瑟参加了ReelShort和其他应用程序的微短剧制作，他把这种形式描述为这一代人的肥皂剧。他还将其比作专门为电视制作内容的频道，比如Hallmark频道。
“People know exactly the story they’re going to be getting, but they will still watch it,” Mr. Esser, 34, said. “They will still love it.”
“观众完全清楚他们将会看到什么故事，但他们还是想看，”34岁的埃瑟说。“他们还是喜欢这种故事。”
For the actress Samantha Drews, ReelShort was a chance to play different types of characters. “I can say now that I’ve been cast in 15 to 16 features in the last few years,” Ms. Drews, 25, said. “That’s not something every actor can say.”
对演员萨曼莎·德鲁斯来说，ReelShort为她提供了扮演不同类型角色的机会。“我现在可以说，过去几年里，我在15到16部故事片中扮演过角色，”25岁的德鲁斯说。“不是每个演员都能这样说。”
Camille James Harman, 57, had a supporting role in the 2018 movie “Vice,” the Dick Cheney biopic starring Christian Bale that received several Oscar nominations. But she said she received a lot more responses for her starring role as an evil stepmother in the 2023 ReelShort production “The Double Life of My Billionaire Husband.”
57岁的卡米尔·詹姆斯·哈曼曾在2018年上映的电影《副总统》中担任过配角，该片是关于迪克·切尼的传记片，由克里斯蒂安·贝尔主演，获得了多项奥斯卡提名。但哈曼说，她因在ReelShort2023年制作的《亿万富翁丈夫的双重生活》中饰演邪恶继母收到了更多的回应。
Other apps with names that are still unknown to many — Sereal+, ShortTV, DramaBox, FlexTV — have started producing such features, hoping to cash in on ReelShort’s formula.
还有一些许多人不知道名字的应用程序——Sereal+、ShortTV、DramaBox、FlexTV——也开始制作微短剧，希望能从ReelShort的模式中牟利。
The quantity of new titles coming out on these platforms is greater than that of many traditional streaming services. And if it’s up to Mr. Jia, that will continue in 2024: “The goal this year is to deliver another 100 titles,” he said.
这些平台上发布的新片数量多于许多传统流媒体服务。贾毅觉得，这种情况将在2024年继续：“今年的目标是再推出100部短剧，”他说。
As ReelShort pumps out its content, the quality of the productions is getting better, said Leomax He, who directed three productions for the app last year. Some shoots now employ a stunt or intimacy coordinator.
随着ReelShort不断推出内容，其作品的质量也在不断提高，何梓源说，他去年曾为该应用执导了三部短剧。有些拍摄场地现在会聘请特技演员或亲密行为协调员。
“Budgets have gotten larger, the cameras are better, the crews are getting larger,” said Mr. He, 27.
“预算已变得越来越大，摄像机越来越好，剧组人员越来越多，”27岁的何梓源说。
Major studios have not yet dabbled in the genre, but some actors and filmmakers speculated that American companies would soon enough start creating their own short-form content.
虽然大影业公司尚未涉足这个剧种，但一些演员和电影制片人推测，美国的电影公司很快会开始制作自己的短剧。
“That’s why I am doing so many of these,” Mr. Esser, the actor, said. “It’s a unique opportunity to be the first guy known from these in the U.S.”
“这就是我参加这么多微短剧制作的原因，”演员埃瑟说。“这是成为美国第一个因为这种类型的作品而出名的独特机会。”