First Look Media is the largest Passionflix investor, though that company’s CEO, Michael Bloom, declined to disclose the size of its stake. (Mrs. Musk remains the majority shareholder of Passionflix.) Founded by eBay billionaire Pierre Omidyar, First Look is made up of several unrelated entities. There is a non-profit organization that focuses on investigative journalism and the making of documentaries. An entertainment studio, Topic specializes in prestigious films like ‘Spencer’, ‘Spotlight’ and ‘The Mauritanian’. A relatively new division houses niche streaming services, including Topic.com, which focuses on crime, and Passionflix.
“We fully understand that we are walking at the feet of elephants,” Bloom said, referring to audience-wide streaming services such as HBO Max and Netflix. “But we’re not trying to be them. There’s an opportunity for specialty services like Passionflix to serve a particular audience in a way the big, mainstream retail guys don’t.”
Romantic escapism used to be a staple of television. It was powered by the miniseries (“The Thorn Birds”, “Hollywood Wives”) in the 1980s and the Movie of the Week in the 1990s (all those wailing Danielle Steel adaptations). But networks largely abandoned those formats in the 2000s. Cost was one reason; networks also began favoring repeatable crime trials and reality shows, including the romance-driven “Bachelor” franchise.
In the past decade, only a few romantic novel adaptations have made it to television. Even fewer (“Outlander” on Starz, “Bridgerton” on Netflix) are hits.
Passionflix was not conceived as a cynical way to monetize the streaming boom, Ms Musk said. Instead, she and two friends, Jina Panebianco and Joany Kane, wanted to make spicy romantic television and couldn’t find buyers in Hollywood.
“So we had to create a distribution solution,” said Ms. Musk.
Mrs. Musk, named after Puccini’s opera, studied film at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. After graduating in 1997, she worked for Alliance, a Canadian production company, before moving to Los Angeles, where she directed, wrote and produced a film, “Puzzled” (2001), with support from Elon. She eventually began producing and directing TV movies for Hallmark, Lifetime, and ION Television.
But she was frustrated. “I kept coming into conflict with network managers, who weren’t interested in stories about empowered women embracing their sexuality.”
