Somewhere between the Hallmark channel and soft-core Skinemax is a movie called Wallbanger. It is set in San Francisco, and it’s directed by a Musk—Elon's younger sister, Tosca—on a streaming platform called Passionflix that you have almost certainly never heard of.
In the two years since its release, Wallbanger has existed in a near-total critical vacuum. Rotten Tomatoes shows zero critic reviews and zero audience ratings. It has a 5.7 on IMDb and a smattering of Letterboxd comments, one of which notes that the poster is "goddamn ugly."
I watched it after getting home from the Sunset Night Market two years ago, thinking I have the scoop of the season! A Musk makes a weird-ass movie about San Francisco. (Unironically—we saw a Trump table at the market that night.) Then I sat on this story for inexplicable reasons; but now I'm here to share all my notes.
First however, some necessary context.
What is Passionflix?
Passionflix is a subscription streaming service that adapts romance novels into original films and series. The New York Times has called it a "sexy Hallmark Channel." To my eyes, it's like they took the romance chick-lit my mom loved in the 90s, and made a whole channel of them that's basically whitewashed, with "sex" you might catch on Desperate Housewives—or Sex and the City after they sanitized it for network TV.
The service was co-founded in 2017 by Tosca Musk, screenwriter Joany Kane, and producer Jina Panebianco. The company has since raised more than $24 million in venture capital—with a 2022 round led by AMC Networks—and has produced 28 original movies, four series, and 11 short films, all adapted from romance fiction by female authors.
You have questions about the Musk connection that'll come later. Suffice to say that Tosca attended several soirées for the 2nd Trump inauguration, where she was seen with RFK Jr.
Wallbanger
This film reeks heavily of The Wedding Planner without budget, charisma, or a single believable San Francisco apartment. It lives in a nonexistent version of SF that has no gay people, and any person of color is set dressing or a sassy sidekick.
We follow Caroline, played by Kelli Berglund, an interior designer in her quest to rediscover her lost orgasm. She moves next door to a man who—to Wallbanger's credit—creates a known problem in San Francisco of too loud sex.
This all is a premise that could wrap in 15 minutes but instead takes about two hours. The pair of them have horrible chemistry that's punctuated by really cliché moments—he kisses Caroline and she pulls away, horrified. Then she slaps him, then pulls him in for more kissing. And they're all wearing clothes from a Forever21 wardrobe you might see on Love Is Blind.
Wallbanger was supposedly filmed in San Francisco but it's mostly B-Roll. Caroline talks about her rent-controlled apartment as if it's uncommon here. Her wall has a framed photo of Coit Tower, and she rides one of these cable cars to work. (That's $9 one way in real life, Caroline.)
The film is based on the best-selling book by Alice Clayton—which has a surprisingly high 3.97-star rating on GoodReads. Clayton lives in St. Louis, Missouri, and I've seen no evidence she visited San Francisco. But she did spend a decade in Los Angeles, working in cosmetics.
Spoiler alert. The protagonists eventually boink and fall in love, but not without many sitcom struggles: her cat hates his hookups. She's got plumbing issues abound. Oh, and Caroline has a green kitchen that would make Dakota Johnson proud.
In San Francisco fashion, the eBook and audiobook are both available on Hoopla; free with a library card. And you can watch it free on Passionflix with a 7-day trial. Not that I'm recommending it.
The Musk of It All
Most people read this because Tosca's brother Elon Musk is the richest person on the planet.
She's tried, with varying degrees of success, to carve out her own identity. "I love my family dearly, and I will always be there and always support them," she told the Hollywood Reporter in February 2025, "but sometimes their beliefs and their structures can be placed on me as if they're the same as mine. And they aren't."
This is a harder line to hold than it used to be.
Tosca has been described as a Democratic donor. She supported the 2020 campaigns of Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff in Georgia. But in January 2025, she attended inauguration parties for Donald Trump's second presidency and was photographed with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. A week earlier, Elon had made a gesture at a Trump inauguration rally that was widely interpreted as a Nazi salute.
For Passionflix, a platform built on the loyalty of a predominantly female subscriber base, the fallout was immediate. Maye Musk posted on X that hundreds of subscribers had canceled. Fans on Passionflix's Facebook page shared screenshots of Tosca's posts defending Elon. "So disappointed in Passionflix," one wrote. "Disgusting," said another. An angry subscriber posted that she was "encouraging authors to look for other ways to get their work on screen."
My personal verdict
I feel like we're canceling everything nowadays—justifiably. But it's a little easy to dump hate on Tosca simply for being a Musk. The more direct path for me is just like my feelings on Philz Coffee: Wallbanger is a bad movie, lol. If you could call it a movie.
I'm not impressed with the Passionflix lineup either, but I just reactivated another free trial on that in order to write this review. So maybe I'll give it a few days and get back to you. Until then I might recommend some San Francisco-based classics: Mrs. Doubtfire, The Wedding Planner, The Bachelor, and The Princess Diaries should get you started.
Saul Sugarman is editor-in-chief and owner of The Bold Italic.
The Bold Italic is a not-for-profit media organization, and we publish first-person perspectives about San Francisco and the Bay Area. We operate under a fiscal sponsorship of a 501(c)(3).
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Photos of 'Wallbanger' are promotional images that we assume Passionflix intended to circulate—even in stories like these.
Some extra credit reading
Here are the notes taken by The Bold Italic writer T. Von D. on the night we watched Wallbanger together in 2024.
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Want more to do in San Francisco?
Check out events.thebolditalic.com
