Reimagining a Soap with AI: From Neighbours to Vertical Microdrama

Neighbours, Australia's long-running soap opera, is being reimagined into phone-friendly vertical micro-episodes with an AI-powered tool. RoseBerry Media, a producer of vertical television, used an AI-driven production tool it calls RedSnapper to publish the show's old episodes on its platform, Epis. The focus is on Margot Robbie's former storylines; but her fellow cast members from the show say they were not consulted in the process.

What happened?

Existing episodes were converted into a vertical format suited to the phone screen and into short micro-episodes. There is no new footage; existing performances were broken apart and reassembled. And this is exactly where the actors object: the content was not produced from scratch — their likeness and their acting were used in a new product without approval.

Why does it matter? AI's real fragility is consent

At the center of the debate is not AI "creating something new" but its repackaging of existing labor. A performance an actor delivered to the camera years ago is being funneled into a new revenue model, in a format their contract at the time never anticipated. Though the technical matter looks simple, the legal and ethical ground is far from settled. That's because old production contracts most often do not cover vertical microdrama for the phone, reimagining with AI, or exploiting the archive in this way at all.

This comes from the same vein as the most visible labor-technology clash of recent years. The core demand of the writers' and actors' strikes in Hollywood was precisely this: protecting digital likeness rights and ensuring that AI cannot generate or reuse a performance without consent. Actors feared that footage shot once could be processed forever without a license. The Neighbours case is that fear made concrete through the archive: there is no new synthetic face, yet an existing performer's work is being turned into a new product beyond their control.

A similar logic can be seen in football. The use of players' digital identities and likenesses in games, advertisements and digital products is increasingly tied to licensing agreements. In other words, identity and likeness have become an asset that is negotiated over. The rest of the entertainment industry is heading in the same direction: whose face, voice and performance can be used, with whose permission, and in what format?

Who does it affect, and how?

Why would the "content for the phone" economy carve up a long-established show? Because vertical microdrama is a fast-growing, cheaply distributed format designed for short attention spans. The archive, meanwhile, is ready-made raw material for this economy, already paid for. Without the risk and cost of new filming, the shortest path to producing content with recognizable faces is to reassemble old recordings.

For the actor the problem is twofold: both the revenue share and control over the context in which the performance will be used. A scene from a series can be forced into a completely different rhythm and narrative in the microdrama format. That means an actor lending their name to a product they never agreed to.

What's next?

The first thing to watch is the language of contracts. New production agreements seem likely to explicitly govern archive use, format, and reprocessing with AI. Second, the unions' response: actors' guilds may demand new rules on reimagining archive content with AI. Third, the spread of this model. Neighbours may not remain the only example; for producers with decades-old show archives, this is an attractive revenue door.

The real issue is not what the technology can do, but with whose permission it does it. Here, AI is not a creator but a repackager. And when the thing being packaged is human labor, consent becomes not a technical detail but the foundation of the work. Until this debate is resolved, every producer with an archive will face a similar test.