Alan Mruvka has spent most of his career bouncing between two worlds that are not supposed to make sense together. One world runs on premieres, red carpets, […]

Alan Mruvka has spent most of his career bouncing between two worlds that are not supposed to make sense together. One world runs on premieres, red carpets, celebrity gossip, and the kind of programming that turned E! Entertainment into a cable empire. The other is self storage. Warehouses. Rolling gates. People stacking boxes inside climate controlled units off the highway in New Jersey.

He knows how absurd that sounds. During our conversation, he joked that he goes “from the most glamorous business to the least glamorous business,” moving between Hollywood and “storing people’s stuff.”

But that contradiction is also the point.

For decades, Mruvka has operated like someone perpetually one media cycle ahead. First it was movie trailers as programming. Then celebrity culture before celebrity culture consumed everything. Now he is betting on vertical storytelling, Microdramas, and the idea that the future of entertainment is not competing with Netflix or Disney. It is competing with the scroll.

What stood out most wasn’t nostalgia for what he had already built. It was his excitement about what comes next.

“I don’t like to look back,” he told me. “I like to look forward. And I’m very, very excited about the times now. I think we’re in such an exciting time right now, with apps and technology and it’s just a great, great, exciting time to be in the business.”

And somehow, he thinks New Jersey might become one of the places where that future gets built.

Vertical Video Is Not a Trend Anymore

The current entertainment conversation around vertical video often feels trapped between two extremes. Either people dismiss it as disposable soap opera content for phones, or they talk about it like it is the second coming of streaming. Alan Mruvka sits somewhere in the middle. He is less interested in defending the format than he is in explaining the obvious thing traditional Hollywood still refuses to admit.

People have already changed the way they watch entertainment. The industry is just catching up.

That thinking led him to launch VERZA, a platform built around one minute vertical storytelling and Microdrama. The concept actually predates the recent explosion in the format.

“About five years ago, I had the idea of one minute television,” he explained. “I see the way people scroll on Instagram and TikTok.” By the time his app was finished, the market had changed dramatically.

“When I thought of building the app there were about five Microdrama apps from China… by the time I finished ten months later, there were over 200.”

Unlike many companies rushing into the space, Mruvka is not trying to recreate TikTok with scripted actors. He sees vertical as a medium, not a genre.

That distinction matters.

Right now, most people still associate vertical storytelling with overdramatic romances, billionaire love triangles, and revenge stories optimized for retention rather than prestige. The model works. China has already proven there is a massive audience for it. But Mruvka sees something familiar.

When he and Larry Namer launched what eventually became E! Entertainment Television in 1987, the idea sounded equally unconventional.

“We used to say that cable was like a newspaper,” he recalled. “You had headlines… sports and ESPN… weather in The Weather Channel… but you didn’t have that entertainment section of the newspaper.”

That instinct reshaped entertainment television.

Now he believes Hollywood is making a similar mistake by programming for viewing habits that no longer exist.

“The days of telling you what to watch, what time to watch it, and where to watch it is over.”

Vertical storytelling assumes people are multitasking. It assumes they are watching on the subway, at work, in bed, between meetings, or while waiting in line.

Even subtitles become part of the design. “They all have subtitles because people watch with the sound off.”

He laughed while telling me about recently picking up his car from valet parking. “The woman had the phone leaning there watching a Microdrama with the sound off.”

That tiny observation says more about where entertainment is headed than almost any industry report.

Hollywood spent years believing streaming was the final evolution of television.

Vertical content assumes something different. It assumes distraction is permanent.

VERZA’s Bigger Bet Beyond Microdramas

Most vertical platforms are still built around melodramatic relationship stories because that’s what currently drives the market. Billionaires, revenge plots, love triangles. The formula has proven incredibly successful, particularly in China, where the format exploded into a multibillion-dollar industry.

Mruvka does not dismiss that success. He simply doesn’t think it represents the ceiling.

While researching the space, he found himself paying less attention to Netflix and far more attention to YouTube. The comparison wasn’t about production value. It was about participation.

“I was reading this thing about YouTube and how YouTube is really so much bigger than every other social media app out there,” he said. “Maybe I could be instead of trying to be the next Netflix of Microdrama, why don’t I be the next YouTube of Microdramas?”

That distinction fundamentally changes what VERZA is trying to become. Instead of functioning solely as another destination for professionally produced content, the platform is evolving into a marketplace where creators can own their audience, launch their own channels, and decide how to monetize their work. Rather than pitching projects into a system where approval comes from a handful of executives, creators can upload directly, set a price with the platform, and begin building an audience.

For actors and independent filmmakers, that shift could be just as significant as the rise of YouTube was for online video. Instead of waiting for a green light from a studio or streamer, creators have another avenue to test ideas, develop an audience, and potentially generate revenue from projects that might never have fit inside the traditional development process.

That does not mean there is no curation. Mruvka was quick to point out that VERZA still reviews submissions to maintain basic standards.

“We look at everything,” he said. “If it passes all the tests, then we’re happy to air it.”

What interested me most was how matter-of-factly he described the process. There was no talk of chasing prestige or discovering the next blockbuster. The emphasis was on giving creators somewhere to put finished work instead of leaving completed projects sitting on hard drives while they searched for distribution.

For an industry where talented actors and filmmakers often spend years trying to get a single project in front of an audience, that may end up being the more disruptive idea than vertical storytelling itself.

Why New Jersey Is Suddenly Competing With Hollywood

For Alan Mruvka, the rise of vertical storytelling is not just changing how audiences consume entertainment. It is changing how entertainment gets made.

The faster content moves, the more traditional production models begin to show their age. Large studio lots were built around feature films and television series that could occupy the same soundstage for weeks or even months. Today’s creator economy often works at a completely different pace. Independent filmmakers, YouTubers, commercial producers, and Microdrama crews are producing more content with smaller teams and tighter schedules. They need flexibility as much as they need space.

That shift is what inspired Filmology Labs, the production campus Mruvka is developing in Paterson, New Jersey.

Rather than building another conventional studio complex with enormous empty stages waiting to be dressed for each production, Mruvka’s vision is built around ready-made environments that dramatically reduce setup time.

”We have 21 rooms… a jail… an apartment… a coffee shop… an interior of a jet,” he explained. “It’s already pre-built and pre-lit.”

Instead of spending valuable production days constructing and striking sets, creators can move from location to location almost immediately. A production might film a courtroom scene in the morning, a bar that afternoon, and an apartment sequence the following day, all without rebuilding anything. For independent productions where time often determines the budget, that kind of efficiency can make projects financially viable that otherwise would not get made.

His ambitions stretch beyond simply renting studio space.

“We really position ourselves as the digital box office for the next generation,” he said.

That philosophy extends to the campus itself. Mruvka described Filmology Labs less as a traditional studio and more as a creative ecosystem, complete with production offices, a commissary, fitness facilities, and collaborative workspaces designed to keep creators in one place from development through production.

The decision to build it in New Jersey is equally intentional.

Mruvka believes the state has quietly become one of the country’s strongest production hubs, thanks to generous tax incentives, experienced crews, and its proximity to New York City.

“It’s a very valuable and creative rich environment,” he said. “You also have the crews and the talent there.”

He pointed out that major companies including Netflix, Lionsgate, and Paramount have already invested heavily in New Jersey, but he sees room for something different. Rather than competing directly with massive studio campuses, Filmology Labs is designed to support the growing middle of the industry, independent filmmakers, YouTubers. commercial productions, music videos. creator-led companies, and microdramas. The kinds of productions that are becoming more common as filmmaking becomes increasingly accessible.

If Hollywood’s future belongs to creators working faster and producing more content across more formats, Mruvka is betting they will need a different kind of home base than the one the industry was built on.

Content Still Wins

One of the biggest surprises from our conversation was how often Mruvka returned to a remarkably old-fashioned idea.

For someone who has spent the last few years building technology platforms, talking about apps, vertical storytelling, AI, and the creator economy, he rarely spoke about technology as though it were the most important part of the equation. Every discussion about distribution eventually circled back to the same thing: the work itself.

“What I’ve learned,” he said, “it’s all about the content.”

It is a simple statement, but it carries more weight coming from someone who has already lived through multiple media revolutions. Mruvka helped build one of cable television’s most recognizable entertainment brands, and now he is trying to help shape another emerging format. Across both ventures, the lesson has remained remarkably consistent. Platforms evolve. Audiences develop new habits. Business models come and go. None of it matters if there is nothing worth watching.

He illustrated the point with an example almost everyone can relate to. “You didn’t say, ‘I’m going home and watch NBC tonight,'” he said. “You say, ‘I want to watch Yellowstone.’ You go for the specific content.”

That distinction feels increasingly relevant in today’s entertainment landscape. Whether audiences are watching a two-hour feature film in a cinema, bingeing a prestige drama at home, or consuming ninety-second episodes on a phone, the platform is rarely what creates emotional investment. People remember performances. They recommend stories. They follow characters long after they’ve forgotten which app they used to watch them.

It’s an encouraging reminder at a time when conversations about the industry often become dominated by algorithms, artificial intelligence, and distribution strategies. Those tools may change how projects reach an audience, but they cannot replace the thing audiences actually show up for.

Technology opens doors. Distribution gets people in the room. Great storytelling is still what makes them stay.

It is the same principle that helped transform E! from an unconventional cable startup into a cultural phenomenon. And, if Mruvka is right, it will be the same principle that separates the next generation of successful creators from everyone else in the vertical era.

Hollywood’s AI Debate Misses the Point

Few topics are generating more anxiety in Hollywood than artificial intelligence. For actors, writers, and filmmakers, the conversation often centres on what AI might replace rather than what it might enable. It has become one of the industry’s defining fault lines, with concerns about jobs, creativity, and authorship shaping everything from studio strategy to union negotiations.

Mruvka understands why people are uneasy, but he believes much of the conversation has become focused on the wrong question.


”It’s not going to replace actors,” he said. “Real actors are never going away.” Rather than viewing AI as a substitute for human creativity, he sees it as another production tool, not unlike the shift from practical effects to CGI or from film editing to digital post-production. Used responsibly, he argues, it gives independent creators access to visual possibilities that were once reserved for productions with blockbuster budgets.

“A young filmmaker can now make a movie with big explosions… car chases… using AI, but with using real actors.”

That distinction is important. Throughout our conversation, Mruvka consistently framed AI as something that expands creative possibilities rather than diminishes the role of performers. Independent filmmakers who once had to write around budget limitations can now think bigger, while actors still remain at the centre of the story being told.

He even compared AI-generated productions to animation, suggesting audiences will always understand the difference between stylized creations and performances delivered by real people. To him, the technology is less about replacing artists than giving them another set of tools to work with.

As the conversation drew to a close, he summed up his outlook in a single sentence. “Whatever you can think of, you can now produce.”

Whether Hollywood embraces AI quickly or cautiously, Mruvka believes the technology is no longer hypothetical. It is already reshaping production, lowering barriers for independent creators, and expanding what can realistically be achieved without the resources of a major studio. The challenge, in his view, is not deciding whether AI belongs in filmmaking. It is learning how to use it without losing sight of the human performances and storytelling that audiences continue to connect with most.

Keep Creating

Toward the end of our conversation, Mruvka stopped talking about platforms altogether.

Instead, he spoke directly to young actors, filmmakers, writers, and creators trying to break into the industry. “Just keep on creating.”

He repeated the phrase several times.

“You evolve as a creator. You fine tune yourself. You get better.”

The advice carries extra weight because it comes from someone who heard “no” hundreds of times before hearing “yes.”

“When I was raising money for E!, I got turned down over 400 times,” he said. “Every time I got turned down, I’m like, ‘I’m going to show this guy.'”

His final piece of advice was even simpler.
“Never, ever give up on something you’re passionate about.”

Entertainment has changed dramatically since Mruvka helped launch E! nearly four decades ago. Cable gave way to streaming. Streaming is now making room for creator-driven platforms and vertical storytelling. AI is reshaping production. Hollywood itself is expanding beyond Hollywood.

But beneath all of those shifts, his philosophy has stayed remarkably consistent.

Find the next audience before everyone else does.

Keep building.

And most importantly, keep creating.