In 1995, the internet was still new. In fact, it was only beginning to go mainstream, in all its rudimentary glory, as it exploded from about just 10,000 websites in January to over 100,000 by December. This was the year when the internet made its mark on our society and our culture, and one of the first films to commemorate and exploit this occasion was “The Net.” 

Filmed largely in San Francisco and Los Angeles, the Sandra Bullock thriller, which celebrated its 30th anniversary in 2025, has been playfully chided for some of its outdated aspects but also praised for its more prescient ideas about internet interfaces, technological development and cyber crime. Bullock stars as Angela Bennett, a computer systems analyst specializing in viruses who has her identity stolen by a nefarious organization involved in cyberterrorism. These early warnings about the internet’s dangers also sit alongside a number of other soon-to-emerge digital realities that the movie helped introduce to the masses. From an ahead-of-its-time pizza ordering webpage to chat rooms with virtual avatars, the technical advisors on the film imagined the near-future possibilities of the internet with an eye toward believability. 

From left, American actor and comedian Dennis Miller, American actress Sandra Bullock and British actor Jeremy Northam attend the premiere of “The Net” in Beverly Hills, Calif., on July 25, 1995.

Producer Rob Cowan recalled the initial pitch meeting: “We went in saying, ‘There’s a thing called the internet, and there’s information about different people that you can track down,’ literally explaining it to them.” Once they got greenlit, they assembled a team of tech specialists. Together, they designed every computer interface and set up a way to shoot the computer scenes easily, with Bullock responding in real time to prompts by the team on the other end. 

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