The first thing to know about the new Bumble movie is that only the last 20 minutes are about Bumble. Swiped, now streaming on Hulu, instead follows founder Whitney Wolfe Herd (played by Lily James) during her earliest days at Tinder.
For the uninitiated, Wolfe Herd joined Tinder when it was still an idea within a startup incubator at Match Group. She sued for sexual harassment after a relationship with cofounder Justin Mateen went south; the Hulu movie’s dialogue pulls from the texts that were exhibits in that lawsuit. Another dispute was whether Wolfe Herd was officially a cofounder of Tinder or not; she said she was stripped of the title because of her gender. Wolfe Herd has maintained, even after her messy exit, that she’s proud to call herself a cofounder of Tinder. The lawsuit was settled in 2014 without admission of wrongdoing.
The experience was positioned, in life and in the film, as central to Wolfe Herd’s founding of Bumble. Being forced out of a company she loved and sent death threats on Twitter inspired her to aim to create a less toxic place for women online—which eventually became a competitor dating app. In reality, it’s a slightly messier story, including a second encounter with toxic workplace behavior at Badoo, the parent company led by Andrey Andreev that helped create Bumble. (The movie depicts that era with actor Dan Stevens doing a heavy Russian accent.)
But while many of the promo images for the film showed the Wolfe Herd character as we know her today—outside Bumble’s yellow office in Austin, Texas, looking polished and corporate—the movie instead mainly follows an earlier iteration of the founder, a young woman unsure how to break into tech or how to succeed within a male-dominated startup.
Bumble is instead built through a highlight-reel montage of Wolfe Herd’s glow-up into successful solo founder: speaking at conferences, opening her own office, testifying to change the law against indecent exposure online at the Texas Capitol.
Is it worth watching if you care more about the Bumble era than drama at Tinder? Perhaps. (I give it a solid three stars). Wolfe Herd has said she didn’t want the film to be made, and it features a disclaimer that she wasn’t involved.
Swiped follows in a tradition of creating narrative out of a company’s origins, rather than its success (see: Mark Zuckerberg’s dorm room drama in The Social Network). Personally, as a writer covering female-founded companies and Bumble for nearly a decade, I’d rather have seen Bumble’s own story, good and bad, onscreen.
But even The Social Network is getting a sequel, 15 years later. So maybe we just have to wait a decade for that story.
Emma Hinchliffe
emma.Hinchliffe@coins2day.com
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