Los Angeles: Tommy Harper, the film producer behind Star Wars and Top Gun: Maverick, is shutting down VeYou, the microdrama app he launched roughly six months ago with ambitions of becoming the “HBO” of the format. A message on the service said it would end November 6 .
A Strategic Pivot, Not an Exit
Harper told Business Insider he will keep producing series but will distribute them through TikTok’s micro-drama app PineDrama, YouTube and other partners rather than operate a standalone destination.
“In the past year, TikTok, Meta, and YouTube all moved hard into short drama,” he said in an email. “When the three biggest attention platforms commit to a format, distribution is decided. The opportunity for an independent company is to be the best supplier to those platforms, not to compete with them for installs. So we’re focused where we have the edge: making the shows” .
Funding and Originals
VeYou raised an undisclosed amount of seed funding from S32, the venture firm started by Google Ventures founder Bill Maris, whose other bets include 23andMe, Impossible Foods and Nest. The app produced a handful of originals, starting with Love Under Fire, a romance drama starring Kasey Esser, who co-wrote the series with Harper .
The Market Shift
VeYou’s shutdown lands as the format it set out to elevate consolidates around the platforms themselves. A report by media consultancy Owl & Co. found that two-thirds of films released by leading microdrama apps outside China in the third quarter were AI-generated, up from just 3% in the first quarter .
TikTok’s free, ad-supported PineDrama launched in January and had captured more than half of all microdrama views across 16 leading apps by the third quarter, according to the same report. YouTube has rolled out a feature letting creators bundle short videos into episodic seasons, and on Meta — the dominant customer-acquisition channel for microdrama apps — some operators are running 20-minute-plus film segments as ads to drive subscriptions .
‘People Want Live Characters’
Lori Golden-Stryer, CEO of RIVR Media, a VeYou producing partner, said the app’s films stood out for their scripts, acting and direction, and that she was encouraged by their performance on TikTok.
“People want live characters,” she said. “I don’t think they want AI. I’ve seen a lot of different verticals, and I’d like to think ours were a little cut above” .
Industry Context
Despite the shakeout, the sector continues to draw institutional interest. COL Group, Virtue Asia and V47 Entertainment are staging what they call the first microdrama industry upfront, Inside Microdramas, in Singapore on October 27, aimed at bringing brand partners into vertical entertainment projects at the development stage. The U.S. microdrama market generated an estimated $1.3 billion in 2025 and is projected to reach roughly $1.5 billion in 2026 .
Harper had launched VeYou in April with ambitions to elevate the vertical format, telling Deadline at the time: “We want to become the HBO of vertical… The vertical microdrama business is a blank slate. Wide open. This is Spotify in 2008” .
