What Fox is doing
Fox Entertainment Studios and Endemol Shine North America are moving Fear Factor from unscripted television into scripted fiction. The platform is Holywater Tech’s My Drama, which gets 30 three-minute vertical episodes built specifically for phone screens. No premiere date has been set.
The story is set during prep week on a remote horror television set. A practical-effects artist and her crew switch on a haunted fortune-telling machine, which forces personalised death trials. The survivors then have to piece together the machine’s origins before it reaches the people they love.
Writers are Thom Woodley and Andrew Beck, with Gabriel Caste directing. Worldwide sales are handled by Fox Entertainment Global.
Why the franchise math matters
The move is being framed as the first-ever leap from an established unscripted television franchise to an original scripted series. That claim is significant for format owners: it turns a familiar brand into a mobile-first content engine instead of simply rebooting the same format for another market.
The timing is backed by ratings. The Johnny Knoxville-hosted Fear Factor: House of Fear opened on Fox and Hulu with 17.5 million multiplatform viewers, ranking as the season’s highest-rated broadcast debut and the No. 1 new unscripted series among Adults 18-49, according to Fox and Nielsen. A Season 2 renewal is already set for the 2026-27 season.
“Vertical storytelling is creating a new language for entertainment, one built on immediacy, intimacy, and serialized discovery,” said Michael Heyerman, EVP Unscripted Series at Endemol Shine North America. The wider Fear Factor format has 32 adaptations worldwide.
What to watch
- A known reality brand is being used to acquire mobile viewers for scripted horror.
- Episode length and framing are designed for the phone, not cut from TV episodes.
- The 17.5M-viewer broadcast audience is the marketing springboard, not a guarantee.
For media planners and content marketers, the tactical lesson is to take the strongest emotional mechanic from a format—here, confronting fear—and rebuild it as serialized fiction. That makes the extension feel logical. But the open question is retention: three-minute chapters have to be strong enough to make a viewer tap the next one.
For My Drama, this is a signal of intent: the platform is moving into scripted horror with a brand that already has built-in awareness. The risk is that viewers arrive expecting reality stunts and need a reason to stay for fictional characters.
Source: Deadline
