Swiped movie review: Downton Abbey stars can't save lacklustre dating app biopic

In recent years, there have been some excellent business brand biopics from Tetris and Air to Blackberry.

So when Disney+ announced one on Whitney Wolfe Herd, the co-founder of Tinder and CEO of Bumble, we had high hopes.

After all, this is the story of the woman who became the world's youngest female billionaire in 2021, when she took her dating app public.

Credited with naming Tinder and sparking its popularity at American universities, her story (like Facebook movie The Social Network) features the highs of a successful start-up amid the tensions within the company.

After some legal wrangling, she sets off to build a little app called Bumble, which is centred on improving the female experience.

A fascinating and inspiring story, yet the new film Swiped, which is loosely based on her tale, doesn't quite hit the mark. Sure, there's some decent acting from Downton Abbey alumni Lily James as Herd and Dan Stevens following the Eurovision movie with another cartoonish European; this time as rival CEO Andrey. Yet this is all very paint-by-numbers TV movie biopic, with plenty of jarringly cringe and cliché, "What if we called the app... Tinder?!" type moments from annoying tech bros lounging in their multicoloured playground offices. Where other films in this genre built on great writing, humour and character depth, this dating app movie is thin and uninspiring in comparison and that's despite the great material available. If you ask us, it's not really worth swiping right on this one.

Swiped is streaming on Disney+ from September 19, 2025.