EXCLUSIVE: Rebelle Media, the company behind the Hulu breakout Tell Me Lies and the films Mr. Malcolm’s List and Long Weekend, is undergoing a strategic rebrand.
Founded by Laura Lewis in 2018 with a focus on female-driven stories, Rebelle will now be singularly focused on romance, developing and producing love-led storytelling across film, television and books.
As part of the relaunch, focused on scaling Rebelle as a romance-focused indie studio, veteran creative executive Amanda Palley has joined as Co-Founder and Chief Creative Officer, partnering with her longtime friend Lewis, who continues as Chief Executive Officer. Palley comes over after more than a decade at CBS Studios and the network, where she served as Senior Vice President of Current Programs and head of Current for CBS’s CW series.
“If we are going to build a love business, it’s fitting that I’m focusing on that via my favorite love story, that of Amanda and me,” Lewis told Deadline. “Best friendships are also true love and Amanda and I met while baby executives at Seed and Fox respectively and have been concocting stories ever since.”
Per Lewis, she and Palley share “a deep love of books, of humanity, of empathy, of film and television, of joy and escape.”
While “many say that they are looking for their ‘soulmate,’” she found hers “in my best friend and I can’t wait to see what this partnership brings to life.”
In a joint statement on the thinking behind the rebrand, Lewis and Palley explained, “We fell in love with storytelling from an early age with a deep love of books (hello Scholastic book fair!), movies, and TV shows that had us ‘shipping’ characters long before we knew the meaning of the word. Films ranging from Notting Hill to Bridget Jones’s Diary to 10 Things I Hate About You to Clueless and all the way back to Philadelphia Story and Bringing Up Baby drove us to want to be in this business. Television shows like My So-Called Life, Friends, Dawson’s Creek, Gilmore Girls, and Buffy the Vampire Slayer drove us to want to be in this business. These films and television shows have become rarer and rarer in the last two decades yet those audiences haven’t disappeared, as the BookTok phenomenon proves. We want to bring back those quality, commercial original stories as well as deliver adaptations for the immense fandoms of everyone from Emily Henry to Christina Lauren to Abby Jimenez. Audiences want to feel, to commune, to dissect, to yearn. We want to as well and are here to deliver.”
When it comes to the projects you can expect from Rebelle, think love in all its many forms. A love story may center on friends, family, ambition, identity, or magic; it may be unrequited, transformative, lost, or complicated, as well as romantic in the traditional sense.
Continuing to operate under its first-look television deal with MGM Television, Rebelle anchors its next chapter in a pair of high-profile book adaptations: Christina Lauren’s The Paradise Problem, which Rebelle is developing as a film in partnership with Popcorn Storm, and Rebecca Armitage’s The Heir Apparent, a recent Reese’s Book Club pick, which the company is developing as an ongoing television series in partnership with Pinky Promise.
An international bestseller that has sold over 500K copies, Lauren’s The Paradise Problem follows a reluctant heir to a vast grocery fortune who reunites with the woman he once married out of convenience — only to ask her to fake that marriage all over again. As they’re drawn into the seductive and ruthless world of his family, what begins as a calculated arrangement quickly blurs into something far more dangerous: the emergence of a love neither of them planned for.
Rebelle’s Lewis and Palley will produce with Popcorn Storm’s Tom Harper and Negeen Yazdi.
The Heir Apparent centers on Lexi, a 29-year-old English woman doing her medical residency in Hobart, who is living a normal, happy kind of life — living with friends on an idyllic vineyard, working too hard, worrying about her bank balance, hoping her old car can hold out another year, wondering if she’s falling in love with her best friend. But Lexi is not your average doctor-in-training, she is actually Princess Alexandrina, third in line to the British throne — albeit estranged from the rest of her family and living in voluntary exile on the other side of the world. But after a terrible accident involving her father and twin brother, she is suddenly the heir apparent, first in line to the throne after her grandmother, the Queen.
Rebelle’s Lewis and Palley will exec produce the series alongside Pinky Promise’s Jesse Burgum and Kara Durrett.
These two projects aside, Rebelle’s upcoming slate also includes a film adaptation of B.K. Borrison’s First Time Caller, works based on bestselling books by Sarah Adams and Jo Piazza, as well as original projects in development with Jennifer Westfeldt (Kissing Jessica Stein), Pat Cunnane (Eternity), Lily Houghton (Forbidden Fruits), Elissa Down (Feel the Beat), and more.
During her prior tenure at CBS, Palley oversaw shows including Tracker, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, Jane the Virgin, Georgie & Mandy’s First Marriage, Walker, and The Big Bang Theory. Previous positions in entertainment include running development for writers Al Gough & Miles Millar (Wednesday, Smallville) and actor Hugh Jackman. She began her career at CAA and serves on the board of Lupus LA.
Palley told us today, “I am beyond thrilled to partner with my best friend to tell stories like the ones we grew up on: stories with rich characters, complex relationships, and emotional twists and turns that will leave you gasping and then rushing online to discuss with like-minded fans. Laura and I have spent the past twenty years talking about our shared book, television, and film obsessions – it seemed inevitable that we would one day make this partnership official. It’s the perfect happy ending to one volume of our story as well as the perfect first chapter of the next.”
Prior to founding Rebelle Media in 2018, Lewis was a media finance agent at CAA, where she worked on films that grossed over $2B at the worldwide box office including Dallas Buyers Club, The Imitation Game, Bachelorette, Sleeping with Other People, Begin Again, Still Alice and The Butler, among many others. She began her career as an executive for Twentieth Century Fox and Edward Saxon Productions and is a member of the Producer’s branch of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, BAFTA, and the Television Academy, as well as a founding member of Producers United.
Rebelle is repped by Linda Lichter at Lichter, Grossman, Nichols, Feldman; The Paradise Problem author Lauren by Holly Root of Root Literary, Matthew Sugarman of Weintraub Tobin, and WME; and The Heir Apparent‘s Armitage by WME and Gaby Naher of The Naher Agency.