If you haven’t seen recently, Disney posted the entirety of the original High School Musical movie in 52 separate posts on their main TikTok account. Many have just alluded to this being a joke gag celebrating the movie on its 20th anniversary. (We are not talking about how that makes us all feel a bit too old today, by the way.) Others have seen it as giving back something to the people and letting OG fans of the movie celebrate it on one of the world’s most popular social apps. I think it’s something else they may be doing.

I believe Disney may have been testing whether it can break into the Micro-Dramas category. If you haven’t seen it yet, Micro-Dramas have been slowly exploding over the last year, especially throughout China. Chinese Micro-Dramas are both highly engaging and extremely profitable. They focus on soap opera-like plots but are filmed vertically, with episodes ranging from 1-5 minutes, if not shorter, making them ideal for vertical first apps like TikTok. The monetization comes in on apps catered to these Micro-Dramas, think like a Netflix subscription, but for only Micro-Dramas. Or freemium models, where the first few episodes are free, then you to pay for the rest of the series once you are hooked.

As I said earlier, this style of content hasn’t really broken through to the Western audience yet. Testing this strategy with a proven soap opera-like story of High School Musical was a great way to see if Disney thinks this could be their new model. Disney+ has been on the fritz, really, since its inception, struggling to make the cash invested in it show positives in the cash books for Disney. Many of the shows are expensive to produce and have seemed to always be up and down with critics and audiences alike. It’s a risky strategy that requires a lot of cash, leveraging that Disney doesn’t seem to be fond of lately. Especially seeing as they’ve been constantly cancelling or scrapping projects.

If Disney decides to try their hand at Mico-Dramas, the cost efficiencies could be significantly better and have a much better upside for getting more viewers. Mico-Dramas require much less time commitment than many standard shows, but can still hold the same cultural impact if done correctly. High School Musical itself wasn’t a terribly complex movie, with simple sets and cheap production outside of the cost of rising star-power actors (at that time). Viewers, especially the demographics Disney really relies on getting into their grasps spend much more of their time scrolling vertically than watching horizontal content nowadays. It just makes so much sense for the mouse company to continue testing this and eventually make themselves into a Micro-Drama empire.

The next High School Musical will be shot vertically and watched on your phone rather than on a big screen.