{"id":28747,"date":"2025-09-18T01:07:09","date_gmt":"2025-09-18T01:07:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/28747\/"},"modified":"2025-09-18T01:07:09","modified_gmt":"2025-09-18T01:07:09","slug":"bumble-biopic-charts-rise-and-fall-of-the-girlboss","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/28747\/","title":{"rendered":"Bumble biopic charts rise and fall of the girlboss"},"content":{"rendered":"

As Andy Warhol surely would\u2019ve put it if he\u2019d lived to see the smartphone era: In the future, every tech startup will get their 15 minutes of cinematic fame. Facebook, Apple, Uber, WeWork, Theranos, and BlackBerry have all had their ripped-from-the-headlines biopics\/miniseries. Now it\u2019s dating apps that take center stage in Hulu\u2019s drama Swiped, which follows entrepreneur Whitney Wolfe Herd (Lily James) and her contributions to the early days of both Tinder and Bumble. While Swiped doesn\u2019t reinvent the startup origin story subgenre, its zippy direction and comedic self-awareness make it easy to swipe right on its rollercoaster of defeat, redemption, and millennial womanhood. In fact, the most interesting (and, occasionally, most frustrating) choice director\/co-writer Rachel Lee Goldenberg (Valley Girl<\/a>, Unpregnant<\/a>) makes is to use Whitney\u2019s story as a metaphor for the broader arc of 2010s white feminism.\u00a0<\/p>\n

It\u2019s 2012, \u201ctech disruptor\u201d bros are everywhere, and Whitney is trying to make a name for herself as one of the few women in the world of app development. While she\u2019s frustrated by how often she gets hit on instead of listened to at L.A. networking events, she also knows how to play the game. When CEO Sean Rad (Ben Schnetzer) impulsively asks her to join a pitch meeting for his Cardify app, she brings a flirtatious edge that helps him seal the deal with a couple of middle-aged execs. When Sean offers her a job at his incubator, her instinct is to establish herself as the favorite woman in the male-dominated office\u2014the girl who\u2019s \u201cnot like other girls.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

The opening act takes on a bright, shiny, almost rom-com sheen, as Whitney takes point on the incubator\u2019s new dating app, MatchBox, which she helps redub Tinder. She uses her experience as a sorority girl to pitch the app to millennial college students, all while falling into a whirlwind romance with her boss Justin Mateen (Jackson White). Goldenberg\u2019s camera lingers on the moments Whitney speaks over a female colleague or fails to share credit with her friend and co-worker Tisha (Myha\u2019la), but, for the most part, the first act of Swiped is awash in the thrill of forging something new. The \u201cWe Will Never Die\u201d<\/a> vibes are high.<\/p>\n

As with The Social Network<\/a> and BlackBerry<\/a>, there\u2019s a compelling procedural aspect to the history lesson about how Tinder revolutionized modern romance at a time when online dating was seen as something for old people. That alone could\u2019ve sustained a simpler film, but Swiped takes a sharp left turn in its second act, as Whitney\u2019s relationship with Justin becomes strained, her role as a co-founder of the app comes into question, and Tinder\u2019s problem with unsolicited dick pics and harassing messages reaches a boiling point\u2014something the other women in the office expect Whitney to speak up against.<\/p>\n

What to watch on Hulu: The best shows streaming right now<\/a>The best movies on Hulu right now<\/a><\/p>\n

As Whitney\u2019s life starts to feel like an impossible pressure cooker, Goldenberg cleverly shifts the tone of the film towards social horror. While the script doesn\u2019t directly reference the Gamergate campaigns of 2014 and 2015, the film captures the feeling of digital harassment in a more visceral way than it\u2019s usually depicted onscreen. Swiped understands the fear of a seemingly nice guy suddenly flipping a switch and cornering you in a hallway or betraying you in a meeting. It also understands that non-stop messages hitting your phone can feel just as threatening. As Whitney later puts it, \u201cThe rules of online behavior have been written exclusively by men. And the result is that most of the online experience is pretty fucking shitty for women.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

James is a compelling leading presence for the saga, capturing both Whitney\u2019s youthful effervescence and the gripping fear that begins to take over her life. That the film can depict the emotional abuse Whitney experiences while still keeping an eye on the misogyny she herself perpetuates is an impressive tightrope. And James\u2019 charisma helps carry the story through its occasional script stumble or on-the-nose moment.<\/p>\n

The trouble comes as Whitney\u2014and the film\u2014leave the male-dominated world of Tinder to enter their girlboss era. Yes, the real-life Wolfe took what she learned at Tinder and founded Bumble as a dating app designed to empower women. But that doesn\u2019t stop Swiped from feeling like a full-on Bumble ad. While there\u2019s an interesting moral wrinkle involving Whitney\u2019s friend and investor Andrey Andreev (Dan Stevens, reviving his Russian accent from Eurovision Song Contest<\/a>), the film slips closer to hagiography when it comes to its leading lady, who learns a lesson in intersectionality and the importance of women supporting women just in time to launch the world\u2019s perfect dating app.<\/p>\n

Swiped\u2018s standard rise-and-fall structure suggests that even things that start out good can become corrupted over time. Yet in choosing to pause its story in 2019, before the myth of the girlboss truly crumbled in the 2020s, it ends on its simplest note. The decision makes Swiped a breezy, empowering watch\u2014at least for those who find the idea of becoming a \u201cself-made billionaire\u201d empowering. But the real revolution would be letting the subjects of female tech biopics remain as messy as the men.<\/p>\n

Director: Rachel Lee Goldenberg
Writer: Rachel Lee Goldenberg, Bill Parker, Kim Caramele
Starring: Lily James, Dan Stevens, Myha\u2019la, Jackson White
Release Date: September 19, 2025 (Hulu)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"As Andy Warhol surely would\u2019ve put it if he\u2019d lived to see the smartphone era: In the future,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":28748,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[156,409,111,139,69],"class_list":["post-28747","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-entertainment","tag-movies","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28747","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=28747"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28747\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/28748"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=28747"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=28747"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=28747"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}