Nectar
Perhaps nectar could be a new slang term for juicy gossip. In the entertainment industry, hype can often be referred to as buzz. Quite fitting given that mainstream Bollywood actress Priyanka Chopra helped to publicize the Bumble dating app in India. There is going to be a film about Bumble founder Whitney Wolfe Herd. The actress chosen to play her is Lily James, who looks nothing like her. If I was the casting director, I would have selected either Vanessa Kirby, Emily Blunt or Emily Kinney. Given the bee theme of Bumble, it’s coincidental that Emily Kinney played a supervillain named Brie Larvan (a.k.a. Bug-Eyed Bandit) in The Flash. The film about Whitney Herd (née Wolfe) is titled Swiped. We should be grateful that Whitney isn’t hovering over the production in the same way that E.L. James was when the latter’s Fifty Shades of Grey was adapted for the big screen.
Below are photos that were revealed two months ago - a month after filming began. Last month, filming ended but no more photos have surfaced. One thing that needs to be addressed about Swiped is that the film is “inspired by” rather than “based on” the life of Whitney Wolfe. Like what British film critic Mark Kermode said, you should always take issue with the former description than the latter because the former implies that facts are being played with loosely for the sake of entertainment (like that disclaimer that often briefly comes up at the end of a reality TV episode). As Dr. (PhD) Kermode said: “I love that phrase – inspired by real events – because it’s, as opposed to what, exactly? So there’s famous examples such as Texas Chainsaw Massacre where at the beginning it says ‘The events you are about to see are true.’ And you go, well, yeah. The events that you’re basing it on didn’t happen in Texas, didn’t involve a chainsaw and probably didn’t involve murder, just grave robbing. But other than that, fine.”
Either way, I think that Lily James is miscast. She is not a natural blonde, and she looks to have a different ethnicity altogether. It would be like when Jessica Alba tried to play a blonde Caucasian, Sue Storm, in Fantastic Four (2005). Don’t get me started on those contact lenses! Some women should stick to their natural born aesthetic. Lily James has her own negative criticism except one that’s reserved for online dating: “I’ve been a sort of serial relationshipper, so I’ve not had any crazy dating stories. However I did go on my mate’s Hinge the other day and I just despaired. I mean, come on! The guys, they were rubbish. I’m sure some of the girls are cr@p too, but men are worse.”
When the film (lacking a final title on IMDB) comes out in 2025, she will be forced to answer questions about whether she has used Bumble or Tinder. Lily is one of the producers of Swiped, however, so how much of her own dating app experience will make it into the final product remains to be seen. Will she use this film as an opulent opportunity to put down Hinge in order to put Bumble on a pedestal? Lily is, after all, playing a character named Megan Conway (going by the name on the lanyard that she is holding in some candid production photos). This suggests that the film is not an authorized biopic about Whitney Wolfe.
For example, Wong Jing made a film titled Casino Tycoon (1992) about Stanley Ho Hung-Sun but the protagonist is named Benny Ho Hsin. It may seem incongruent to reference this but July 2017 was when Imagine Entertainment entered into a $100 million TV co-financing venture with a Hong Kong television corporation called TVB. The relevance being that, in the following July, it was announced that Whitney Wolfe Herd had been added as a non-voting member of the board of directors of Imagine by chairmen Brian Grazer and Ron Howard. Brian said: “As we continue to evolve and grow Imagine, we wanted to add someone to the board who would bring a fresh and original perspective – someone who thinks completely differently than we do but at the same time understands the value of human connection and story-telling. Whitney brings relevancy and a fresh perspective to our business. We are honored that she has agreed to join our board.”
Lying by omission is one aspect that any researcher could take issue with regarding biographical consistency. In December 2013, Whitney Wolfe met an “oil and gas” heir on an Aspen skiing trip - not only was this four months before she resigned from Tinder (which she had co-founded) but this was exactly twelve months before she founded Bumble. In November 2023, Whitney announced that she would no longer be the CEO of Bumble. This means that she can boast that she could relax while celebrating the tenth anniversary of her union to her boyfriend.
At the same time, she can boast that she needed less than a decade to become a billionaire. Even if Lily James negates the gold-digging connotation of their union so as to create a pure love story, this will cause some problems for her because she said: “It sometimes stresses me out that I'm being offered a lot of roles that fit that description because I have much more to offer than being confined to that 'romantic girl' box - I have many sides to my personality. I can get angry quite easily if things bother me... I want to be able to express my many different sides in all sorts of characters.”
Making a film about a woman with a different name altogether suggests that they will approach the Tinder backstory one of two ways - address the legal confrontation of why Whitney left Tinder without incurring the wrath of the men who she wanted to sue, or ignore the dark side of that story altogether so that it becomes yet another example of creative differences leading to a new business. The problem is that the only way to adopt the former approach is to change the names completely, but they still want to use Bumble as the name of the new dating app.
Since the film is not going to be faithful to the source material that is Whitney Wolfe’s life, this means that the distributor behind it could demand reshoots with or without a test screening. A reshoot can change the tone of a film from Erin Brockovich to Sex and the City. I bring up the former because Whitney had to leave Tinder following sexual harassment by a colleague, which resulted in a lawsuit that was then settled out of court for a million dollars. A more recent example of a female-driven lawsuit-themed film would be Bombshell (2019). This starred three blondes who Lily will be competing with - Charlize Theron, Nicole Kidman and Margot Robbie.
Furthermore, Whitney lobbied for bills across the U.S. to illegalize sending sexually explicit pictures without consent, and she had also incorporated an AI-based tool to detect nude photos in private chats and allow recipients to view or forever block the images. While Lily James won over pundits for her role as Pamela Anderson in the biographical series Pam & Tommy (2022), this is a different kettle of fish that she is playing with. Even then, she became yesterday’s news in the same year when Ana de Armas played Marilyn Monroe in Blonde. While Blonde was a Netflix release, Swiped will be released by Hulu.
An idea for the poster that I have is for the initial to be singled out so that people can detect the pun i.e. Swiped. When people talk about ruining or even saving computers, “wiping the memory” is an expression. Generally, people talk about wiping the slate clean. Although Bumble is known for being a female-friendly app where the woman is in charge of initiating contact, the screenplay is a case of two women and one man. One could argue that this arrangement sets up a joke about the male screenwriter being outvoted two to one.
A good reference point would be a 2017 Netflix series called Girlboss. It's based on Sophia Amoruso's autobiography of the same title, and she was even one of the executive producers but the protagonist's name was changed to Sophia Marlowe. In the case of Swiped, telling a story that takes place ten years ago won’t be as appealing to the new generation. Also, telling a story that’s “inspired by” is only really a good thing if there are things that you want to express that you wouldn’t be allowed to express if you were telling a straight-up biopic.
This film is a disaster waiting to happen. The story of Bumble without Tinder is like the story of Megadeth without Metallica. Can you imagine a film biopic about Dave Mustaine where it begins after him being kicked out of Metallica? In the case of Whitney Wolfe, the story could be condensed so that it begins with her either as a university student like The Social Network (2010) or a graduate like the TV series Silicon Valley (2014). Either way, it’s hard to imagine Swiped being taken seriously like Jobs (2013) or Steve Jobs (2015).
I don’t buy Lily James as Whitney Wolfe. She would be more believable as Leisha Hailey or Gal Gadot. In my opinion, Lily should have played Jennifer Jason Leigh in a film about the death of Vic Morrow (i.e. JJL’s father) during the making of the eighties Twilight Zone movie that was not only co-produced but co-directed by Steven Spielberg. That’s a story that needs to be told in light of the accidental killing of cinematographer Halyna Hutchins during the making of Alec Baldwin’s Rust in 2021.