One story, two screens: Summer Session is developed as a microdrama and a film at once

<p>On 28 October, <a href="https://deadline.com/2026/10/summer-session-clarence-hammond-microdrama-feature-film-1237206927/">Deadline reported</a> that <em>Summer Session</em>, a romantic short story by <a href="https://www.imdb.com/name/nm6032383/">Clarence Hammond</a>, is in development twice over. One version is a microdrama. The other is a feature film. A microdrama, or vertical drama, is a series of short episodes filmed upright for a phone. The same person will direct both versions. <a href="https://www.imdb.com/name/nm3958834/">Kristen Brancaccio</a> develops the story in vertical format, and Hammond adapts the script for the film.</p> <p>The plot is "under wraps", Deadline wrote, and the piece names no platform, buyer, budget or release date.</p> <p>One month earlier, on 29 September, <a href="https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/microdramas-director-landed-first-feature-film-1236714067/">The Hollywood Reporter</a> had announced Brancaccio's first feature, <em>Crush Party</em>, for Graviteur Studios. That makes two film jobs in 29 days for a director whose recent credits are mostly vertical.</p> <h2>Who sits around the table</h2> <p>Hammond writes. He is also a film executive. He began at Will Smith's Overbrook Entertainment, where he produced <em>Sprinter</em>, <em>Life in a Year</em> and <em>Charm City Kings</em>, and <a href="https://deadline.com/2020/11/paramount-players-hires-overbrook-entertainment-exec-clarence-hammond-as-svp-production-1234619608/">joined Paramount Players in 2020</a>. Deadline lists a previous sale of the same kind: his short story <em>Final Boarding</em> went to Screen Gems, with <a href="https://deadline.com/2026/03/christopher-landon-directing-final-boarding-screen-gems-1236750422/">Christopher Landon adapting and directing</a>.</p> <p>He produces <em>Summer Session</em> with Maria Frisk and Michael Napoliello of Ancora Entertainment, Katie Zipkin-Leed of Artists First and Matt Shepley of Select Management Group. Artists First and Select also represent Brancaccio, with Myman Greenspan. The two management companies are on the producing side and on the director's side of the same project.</p> <p>Brancaccio framed the deal around two audiences. "I'm thrilled to be bringing Clarence's beautiful world of <em>Summer Session</em> to life for both traditional and digital audiences," she told Deadline. She described Shepley and Zipkin-Leed as having been "on the forefront of bridging the gap between vertical and legacy entertainment".</p> <h2>A director made in vertical</h2> <p>Brancaccio started her career on YouTube. The Hollywood Reporter says she worked on the comedy channel The Key of Awesome, then as a contractor for the platform. A pilot she wrote and directed for SyFy "never went further than it did", she told THR. Its production designer knew a producer at a microdrama company working with ReelShort. The pilot reached ReelShort producers in early 2024. "Hey, there's a new format in town. We're shooting this movie vertically. Are you interested in directing it?" she remembers being asked.</p> <p>The Hollywood Reporter counts 21 verticals. Deadline writes "more than 20", for TikTok, ReelShort, NetShort and DramaShorts among others. The best known is <em>Screen Time</em>, which THR describes as the first microdrama from Issa Rae's company Hoorae Media. The two trade papers give it different numbers. The Hollywood Reporter wrote "nearly 75 million views in its first week on TikTok and PineDrama". Deadline wrote "more than 250 million views in its first month on TikTok". Brancaccio herself said "at least 250 million views, if not more" in the same THR interview. The first figure covers 7 days and the second about 30. They do not contradict each other. Neither paper says who did the counting.</p> <p>Graviteur Studios, a joint venture between Dolphin Entertainment and KYNETIC Media Ventures, found her through <em>Screen Time</em>. "With Kristen, she's shown how exceptional of a storyteller she is across formats and genres," Emerson Davis, its head of development and production, told THR. <em>Crush Party</em> is a thriller and horror script. Graviteur developed it in-house. Shooting begins in 2027.</p> <p>Asked what vertical work teaches, Brancaccio said: "We're turning out a movie a month, essentially." She calls her method "shooting for the edit", which means deciding the cut on set because there is no time to find the film in post-production. In microdrama, she said, "time, budget, creative is the order in which you have to think about things", an order she expects the feature to let her reverse.</p> <h2>Which way the story travels</h2> <p>Until now, stories have mostly moved from reading platforms to vertical series, once readers had proved them. Our vertical drama booklet, linked below this article, describes the format as "an adaptation industry before it is a production industry", built on Chinese online literature: 32.69 million authors and 45.84 million works in 2025. On 15 October, <a href="https://company.wattpad.com/blog/wattpad-and-reelshort-partner-to-adapt-fan-favorite-stories-into-serialized-vertical-drama-series">Wattpad announced</a> a deal to adapt three of its stories for ReelShort.</p> <p>A second direction appeared in September, from the vertical towards the film. On 7 September, <a href="https://deadline.com/2026/09/lovehit-microdrama-literary-classic-originals-1237069378/">Deadline reported</a> that LoveHit, a Los Angeles studio, was launching that month with public-domain classics such as <em>Wuthering Heights</em> and <em>Jane Eyre</em>. Each title had been written, shot and edited in both formats, according to Deadline: about 50 episodes of 1 to 3 minutes on one side, 90 minutes on the other. The films were taken to MIPCOM, the Cannes market, from 12 to 15 October, for television and streaming buyers. <a href="https://www.streaming-radar.com/p/streaming-radar-59-youtube-mipcom-creator">We noted after the market</a> that none of the seven trade reports we read named a buyer for those films, nor for the microdramas that Fox and A+E had recut into features. We wrote about LoveHit's two cuts in <a href="https://www.verticaldrama.tv/news/room418-horror-slate-wattpad-folklore/">our piece on Room418</a>.</p> <p><em>Summer Session</em> follows neither path. No vertical is recut into a film: one director develops a written story for two screens from the start, while the film script stays with the author. On the evidence Deadline gives, what changed hands is the story, with two formats attached.</p> <h2>Rommi starts before the book</h2> <p>Rommi, a New York studio announced on 1 October, goes one step further back. Its founders are Jamie Gordon, co-founder of Fugitive Films, and Maggie Malina, former head of scripted programming at MTV and VH1. Rommi commissions "original stories from established, best-selling authors to be adapted for the screen prior to any publication debut", <a href="https://variety.com/2026/digital/news/rommi-romance-vertical-content-studio-1236894739/">Variety reported</a>.</p> <p>Its first title, <em>Drive Me Mad</em>, comes from an original idea by romance author Ali Rosen. Two rivals share a rental car for 900 miles after a nationwide airport outage, then find they are chasing the same client. <a href="https://fangirlish.com/2026/11/02/rommi-is-making-vertical-romance-movie-adaptations-for-booktok-and-drive-me-mad-is-first/">Fangirlish</a> calls it a "micro mini movie". It reported on 2 November that the film is out on <a href="https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCCvqJH9CUB5-DOG392cvxKA">YouTube</a>, Instagram and Facebook. No app is named. The studio co-produces with Bookish Media, a book-focused media company run with BookTok creator Morgann Book, and is also adapting published novels such as <em>The Mixtape</em> by Brittainy Cherry.</p> <p>"Romance readers deserve and want a constant stream of high-quality book adaptations," Rosen said, quoted by Fangirlish. In Variety, Malina said Rommi would "fill the gap between streaming and theatrical releases".</p> <h2>What a story is worth when it can be cut three ways</h2> <p>Holywater makes a similar point. "Our goal is to build a diverse content library with strong IP that can grow into longer-running stories, multiple seasons, and potentially other entertainment formats," Illia Berestovskyi, chief R&amp;D officer of Holywater, which runs the My Drama app, <a href="https://www.streaming-radar.com/p/interview-with-illia-berestovskyi-holywater-tech">told us in October</a>. IP, intellectual property, here means a story whose rights a company holds and can extend.</p> <p>My view: the three cases of this autumn point to one change of method. A story is starting to be valued by the number of formats it can carry, and the vertical is the quickest of them to make and put in front of viewers. None of these reports gives a cost, but Brancaccio describes vertical production as "a movie a month". <em>Crush Party</em>, for which she was hired in September, starts shooting in 2027. The vertical can go out first and show whether a story holds an audience before the expensive version is shot.</p> <p>For Europe, the numbers are different. France's main online reading platform, Fyctia, claims about 25,000 authors, the booklet notes, against 32.69 million in China. That is about 1,300 times fewer. No European publisher will build a reservoir of that size. A writer can still sell one story in several formats from the first contract, as Hammond has just done. My bet is that European rights holders will get further by selling each story in several formats than by trying to match China's volume of authors.</p> <p>Asked by THR about her own ambitions, Brancaccio pointed to YouTube creators who have moved into film. "I think that will stop being an outlier and that will start being a more established pipeline," she said.</p> <p>What we do not know is how the two <em>Summer Session</em> versions depend on each other. Deadline does not say whether the vertical goes first, whether it serves as a test for the film, or whether the two are financed together. No platform has been named for the vertical, and no studio for the film.</p>