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Swordfish (film)

2001 film directed by Dominic Sena

Manuscripts, fine bindings, an engraving plate and preserved performance ephemera
Arts and lettersInterpretive dossier study · Crown Archives visual atlas
Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionSep 23, 2026
Entity authorityQ486954 ↗
Source-derived summary

Swordfish is a 2001 American action-thriller film directed by Dominic Sena, written by Skip Woods, produced by Joel Silver, and starring John Travolta, Hugh Jackman, Halle Berry, Don Cheadle, Vinnie Jones, and Sam Shepard.

Stanley Jobson is an ex-con and computer hacker who is recruited into a bank robbery conspiracy.

Swordfish was released by Warner Bros. Pictures on June 8, 2001. The film received mostly negative reviews, and grossed over $147.1 million in worldwide box office receipts on a production budget of $102 million.

Plot

Cyber-hacker Stanley Jobson becomes notorious for infecting the FBI's Carnivore program with a computer virus. Stanley's parole forbids him from accessing the internet and computers while his ex-wife, Melissa, an alcoholic and part-time porn star, issued a restraining order against him. This also prevents him from seeing his daughter, Holly.

Ginger Knowles persuades Stanley to work for Gabriel Shear, who forces him into cracking a secure Defense Department server. After the hack, Gabriel offers Stanley $10 million to program a multi-headed worm, a "hydra", to siphon $9.5 billion from the government slush funds.

Editorial summary

“Swordfish (film)” enters the record as 2001 film directed by Dominic Sena. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Swordfish, film and directed can confirm, complicate or overturn.

Editorial reviewBest approached as a cultural-object dossier: authorship and date matter, but circulation and reception often explain the wider significance. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—2001—that can be checked directly. The authority record carries competing date values—2001-06-04, 2001-11-01—which should remain separate until their references and qualifiers are resolved. Its strongest next move is a source search built around Swordfish, film and directed.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

“Swordfish (film)” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Swordfish, film and directed provides the most credible route into that argument.

Evidence profile

Object files, edition statements, performance records and contemporary criticism preserve different stages of the work’s history. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 23, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q486954. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 2 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2001.

Critical limits

Rights, attribution and provenance may remain disputed even when a general reference summary presents a stable account. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.

How to read it

Separate the work, its editions or performances, and its later reception. Catalogue records, publication histories and object files often preserve different parts of that story.

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  • Identifying works and editions
  • Tracing reception history
  • Finding collection records
Verify next

The original object or edition, catalogue raisonné, performance record, rights file and holding institution.

Three-step research path

  1. Establish the record: confirm the title “Swordfish (film)”, its source revision and the description used here.
  2. Expand the search: follow Swordfish (film) primary sources, Swordfish (film) archive and Swordfish research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
  3. Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.

Questions for further research

  1. Which source most directly establishes the central claim about “Swordfish (film)”?
  2. Which edition, object, performance or recording is being described?
  3. How did later circulation or interpretation alter the work’s reception?
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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from “Swordfish (film)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.