I have a reported piece up today that I’m pretty excited about, so here’s a little table-setting before I drop the link.
The first website I ever went on was a dedicated marketing site for Johnny Mnemonic, which came out this month in 1995. All movie ads in newspapers had recently started featuring urls, so I finally tried one. It took so long to log on.
Also released that summer: The Net, Hackers, Virtuosity... and the Netscape IPO that kicked off the dot com boom. It had been around for a while, but the internet truly started hitting critical mass right as it hit movie theaters.
All of those films, and Kathryn Bigelow's Strange Days too, were lumped together as “internet movies” at the time, but only The Net and Hackers were set in the present. They were the first to steer mainstream audiences toward the America Online internet as it existed in 1995.
Some might say that we are still living in the present of The Net.
We are living in The Net (1995), but without the comedic stylings of Dr. Alan Champion, played by Dennis Miller.
lolol. Incredibly, Miller was also in Disclosure, which came out the year before, and which I use as a negative example of an early internet movie throughout the article.
May 11, 2025 14:04
