First Look Media is the largest Passionflix investor, though that firm’s chief government, Michael Bloom, declined to reveal the dimensions of its stake. (Ms. Musk stays Passionflix’s majority proprietor.) First Look, based by Pierre Omidyar, the eBay billionaire, is made up of a number of unconnected entities. There’s a nonprofit arm centered on investigative journalism and documentary filmmaking. An leisure studio, Matter, focuses on status movies like “Spencer,” “Highlight” and “The Mauritanian.” A comparatively new division homes area of interest streaming companies, together with Matter.com, which focuses on crime, and Passionflix.
“We absolutely perceive that we’re strolling on the toes of elephants,” Mr. Bloom mentioned, referring to all-audience streaming companies like HBO Max and Netflix. “However we’re not attempting to be them. There is a chance for specialty companies like Passionflix to superserve a selected viewers in a manner that the massive, mainstream retail guys don’t do.”
Romantic escapism was a tv staple. It was powered by the miniseries (“The Thorn Birds,” “Hollywood Wives”) within the Eighties and the movie-of-the-week within the Nineteen Nineties (all of these moaning Danielle Metal variations). However networks largely deserted these codecs within the 2000s. Price was one cause; networks additionally started to favor repeatable crime procedurals and actuality reveals, together with the romance-driven “Bachelor” franchise.
Over the past decade, solely a smattering of romance novel variations have made it to tv. Even fewer (“Outlander” on Starz, “Bridgerton” on Netflix) have been hits.
Passionflix was not conceived as a cynical solution to money in on the streaming growth, Ms. Musk mentioned. Moderately, she and two buddies, Jina Panebianco and Joany Kane, wished to make spicy romance tv and couldn’t discover consumers in Hollywood.
“So we needed to create a distribution answer,” Ms. Musk mentioned.
Ms. Musk, named after Puccini’s opera, studied movie on the College of British Columbia in Vancouver. After graduating in 1997, she labored for Alliance, a Canadian manufacturing firm, earlier than shifting to Los Angeles, the place she directed, wrote and produced a film, “Puzzled” (2001), with backing from Elon. She in the end started producing and directing TV motion pictures for Hallmark, Lifetime and ION Tv.
However she was annoyed. “I saved stepping into conflicts with community executives, who weren’t interested by tales about empowered girls embracing their sexuality.”
Supply: NY Times
