Published on 26, Oct 2022

Phony Texts Adapts Viral Story into Short Film Break In  

LOS ANGELES, California – Phony Content, a digital production house whose writers produce 1-2 new scripted text message stories everyday for social media, has announced it has wrapped filming of Break In. The new short film, which started as a Phony Texts and accrued over 15M views before being adapted for theaters, dramatizes what happens when a man breaks into what he believes is the apartment of his best friend’s girlfriend.

“We are very excited about bringing Break In, one of our most popular Phony Texts episodes, to the big screen so that our fans can see the live-action grow outside the chat bubbles,” says Jesse Brooks, co-founder of Phony Content. “We had a great time creating the narrative and seeing it come alive as a movie. Our next goals are to build Break In into a feature within the next few years and to continue to develop more of the stories from Phony Texts into bigger productions.”

This production comes on the heels of another of Phony Content’s projects, iBible, which was accepted to SXSW 2020. iBible focuses on making Biblical stories accessible to the Gen Z audience through text messages and videos as well as fictionalized FaceTimes. 

“This was one of the most challenging  projects we have taken on,” Phony Content states. “It tested our team’s creative skills to adapt the world’s most well-known stories into our format. How do you take Noah and show him learning to build the Ark on YouTube? We couldn’t have accomplished the project without our hardworking and creative team of editors and designers.”

Phony Content, which runs syndicated programming for Phony Texts in seven languages (German, French, English, Dutch, Arabic, Spanish, and Norwegian), has also launched its new romance channel in France: "L'amour au bout du fil,” or “Love on the Line.” It is the first syndicated program to feature Phony Content’s love stories. 

“Our short form series, which airs on Snapchat Discover, follows scripted, dramatized conversations between characters on Snapchat,” says Phony Content. “Gen Z in particular will relate to the banter and drama on our show, as our stories are very relatable and relevant to our real relationships to our screens.”

With the goal of developing more short films and larger projects, Phony Content will also be expanding to a new office location in Echo Park. With the additional space, the company plans to workshop more ideas as well as shoot productions of stories from Phony Texts, including one that will go into production in the fall of 2022. With the new office, the company will foster a larger, more collaborative space that will allow Phony Content’s writers and design team to handle all aspects of a production in-house.

Phony Content invites everyone, no matter their generation, to check out its comedic stories across social. “Whether we are in our twenties or our eighties, we all need to laugh,” the company states. “And, remember to watch Break In before you see our short film: that way, you can join the debate on whether the book, so to speak, is better than the movie.”

Phony Content was founded in 2018 by two Gen-Z brothers, Jesse and Simon Brooks, who realized that the old coffee shop and bar banter they grew up with now happens in group chats. With this in mind, the two decided to take the same formula of a situation comedy and reimagine it for mobile audiences. Jesse and Simon launched Phony Texts, a chat fiction network that scripts text message conversations. Together they have built a team of writers and editors that produce 1-2 stories every day. Since 2018, they have expanded Phony Texts and now have six different Snapchat shows and an audience well over 14M across all of its social media channels. Phony Content gets over 170M minutes watched per month and over 70M video views per month across its network.

For more information on Phony Content, please visit its website or contact:

Phony Content
hello@phonycontent.com