Trivia / Hackers

• Actor-Inspired Element: Matthew Lillard stated that there was no background information given to him on his character Cereal Killer after he was hired and that he came up with it. The reason why Cereal carries his toothbrush around everywhere and crashes on other people's couches is due to his parents possibly being abusive due to a line in a previous draft of the script where Cereal states his parents were "a bad mom and a bad dad."
• Billing Displacement: While a main character, Angelina Jolie's name didn't appear on the cover until after she'd become famous from other roles. She is, however, a prominent character.
• Box Office Bomb: Budget, $20 million. Box office, $7,563,728. It was panned by critics for its dumb plot and its unconvincing portrayal of hackers. It still became a Cult Classic.
• Dawson Casting: Although they were all playing high school students, Jonny Lee Miller was 23 at the time of filming, Angelina Jolie was 20 and Matthew Lillard was 25. Only Jesse Bradford really fit the bill, being 16 at the time. Bonus points go to Laurence Mason (who played Lord Nikon), who was 31 at the movie's release, though Nikon has an apartment of his own, so he is shown to be at least a few years older than the others in his peer group.
• Fake American: Jonny Lee Miller as Dade.
• Irony as She Is Cast: Angelina Jolie later admitted that she didn't even know how to turn a computer on.
• Romance on the Set: Leads Jonny Lee Miller and Angelina Jolie got married after the movie's release, but divorced a few years later.
• Technology Marches On: The film is rooted in mid '90s technology:
  • The characters are in awe of Kate's new, super-fast 28.8b modem. It's got an Active Matrix display too (haven't seen one of them on a LCD in, what, 20 years?). And a P6 chip - triple the speed of the Pentium!
  • Phone Phreaking is significantly featured. This stopped being possible with the change to digital phone switches in the late 90s.
  • The main characters talking very highly of the RISC architecture. The CISC vs RISC "battle" was mostly a marketing thing with some underlying technical meaning. It petered out in the late 90s, as CISC won convincingly in the desktop and server markets though RISC won in the long term on mobile.
  • Dade uses a "lunchpail" style luggable computer. That's old tech by even 1990s standards; the lunchpail format was the very first "portable" computer style from the early 1980s. It was replaced by the now-ubiquitous clamshell laptop design by 1990. At least the Plague had the decency to mail Dade a clamshell laptop later in the film...if for dubious reasons.
  • The "battle of the tapes" scene — nowadays tape is pretty much unknown and they'd be fighting over digital files.
  • For those in the know, Cereal Killer's collection of "Crayola" books are all completely obsolete. Several are classics, but archaic. Good basic theory, yes, practical applications anymore, no.
  • Many of the display dialogs are Macintosh System 7. Last release version: 1997.
  • Heck, look at the plethora of public pay phones. Seen any one of those in two decades? (Hint: they were almost completely removed in the 2000s, though NYC has almost a quarter of the remaining total nowadays).
  • Pagers. 'nuff said.
  • 3.5" Floppy disks!
  • Oddly subverted in-universe in one key way: despite a seven-year hiatus in his computer use, Dade has no perceptible difficulty resuming his hacking when he turns eighteen, as if nothing had changed between 1988 and 1995.
  • Crashing 1,507 computers in a day is no longer that impressive.
    • Dade did that ten years earlier. In The '80s. And he hit the market so hard the NYSE dropped four points across the board. Nowadays he'd be in Gitmo until his hair fell out. Or working for the NSA, FBI, or some other special government agency, using his powers with other collared hackers to fight cyber-criminals.
    • The NSA offers a scholarship program at MIT for students who will pursue a career with the agency. As he committed these hacks as a child, he'd probably be shortlisted for that program or something similar.
  • Plague's VR rig is a sort of cyclical version. It was breathtakingly expensive and high-end at the time, but within a matter of years became a ridiculous antique as the original VR craze petered out and died. Now that VR has actually reemerged, if you weren't aware of the original version his headset and controller would actually look relatively sleek, with the biggest question being why he's not in the middle of a large open space.
• What Could Have Been:
  • Heather Graham, Hilary Swank and Liv Tyler auditioned for Kate. Katherine Heigl was approached as well, but she was in the middle of doing Under Siege 2: Dark Territory.
  • Edward Norton auditioned for a role.
  • According to Fisher Stevens, Quentin Tarantino was also considered for the role of The Plague.

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