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.)
