The best of 2018 in entertainment and pop culture

2018 saw the release of a record-breaking number of major superhero films. That includes Avengers: Infinity War, the first superhero film to gross more than $2 billion worldwide, and Black Panther, which grossed $1.34 billion, making it the fourth highest-earning superhero film ever. It was a year in which superheroes triumphed — but it was, also, unfortunately a year in which ugly political realities made most superhero fantasies seem increasingly strained and irrelevant. The superhero genre is clearly one of the major draws for moviegoers at the moment. But it feels less and less like what we need as a culture.

Superheroes have always been political. Colorful figures in tights were beating the tar out of the Nazis long before America was ready to face that conflict in the real world. Faced with a looming global threat, Americans during World War II flocked to pick up stories of star-spangled heroes like Wonder Woman and Captain America, who thumped Axis agents (and Hitler himself!) while spreading the gospel of justice and righteous empowerment.

As always, the first days of January are a time to look back on the previous year and wrap it up into a neat package, usually by thinking “Oh geez, did that actually happen last year? It feels like that was a decade ago.” That’s why it can be fun to look back on our favorite things of the year, the culture that endured with us past release weekend or the latest news cycle. Here’s what made a difference to us in 2018.

When Noelle Stevenson’s Netflix reboot of She-Ra: Princess of Power dropped its first preview images online, a familiar dank, never-pleased subsection of the internet started griping about them. But a completely different area of the internet took inspiration from the new designs, and started creating and sharing She-Ra fan art. This isn’t a new phenomenon, but it’s an important one in an pop culture environment increasingly driven by nostalgic, regressive, “Why can’t culture just stop at the point where I personally liked it most?” whining. The new wave of fan artists are predominantly young women, often students exploring their own styles by applying them to outside work. And they’re embracing and transforming culture they love, claiming ownership while still mostly sharing with each other. (Mostly. Even the fan art community has its bitter internal controversies. Like anything people use as a support and survival tool, it engenders strong passions, including proprietary and exclusionary ones.)

It’s easy to forget that Fortnite — a cultural phenomenon that now has over 200 million registered players — began as a failure. It was conceived as a player vs. environment game that Epic Games founder Tim Sweeney described as a cross between Minecraft and Left 4 Dead in 2015, before co-opting the last-man-standing mechanics of PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds and becoming the biggest game on the planet. Fortnite stole that idea and then perfected the formula by making it less technical and more accessible; it won the fight for battle royale’s soul by being bigger, wackier, and just more fun than PUBG’s sterile, militaristic experience. Fortnite became the better game by leaning into goofiness.

The game’s real achievement is subtler, though. Epic Games managed to produce a hit, sure, but the genius of it is how it’s rewritten the idea of what hanging out online can be. Fortnite is a game, but it’s also a global living room for millions of people, and a kind of codex for where culture has gone this year — it’s a cultural omnibus that’s absorbed everything from Blocboy JB’s shoot dance to John Wick. It got Ted Danson to learn how to floss. This thing is here to stay, as a new kind of social network.

2018 has been a good year for video games. From blockbuster epics to smaller indie experiences to inventive takes on VR, the breadth and variety of games that came out over the last 12 months is astounding. To celebrate, Verge staff members are writing essays on their own personal favorite games, and what made them stand out above the crowd.

Return of the Obra Dinn begins at the end. The end of a story, the end of a life, the end of a barrel of a gun.

The long and bleak year of 2018 is almost over. It was a year full of devastating storms and disasters, scandal after scandal from tech companies, and chaotic politics from around the world. If there was any bright point in the year, it was that 2018 also brought with it a bumper crop of fantastic science fiction, fantasy, and horror novels that served as an oasis to examine the world around us, or to escape for brighter pastures.

The best books of this year told stories of interstellar colonization, of fantastic magical civilizations, optimistic alternate worlds, and devastating potential futures. They brought us fantastic characters who sought to find their places in the vivid and fantastic worlds they inhabited.

“More people watch gaming video content than HBO, Netflix, ESPN and Hulu combined,” data crunchers at Nielsen say. It feels like we get metrics like these every year, meant to prove just how big and influential platforms like Twitch are. Somehow, though, the cultural impact of live streaming hasn’t felt entirely real. (If it was, Nielsen wouldn’t have to say so.) Sure, tons of people might watch a man in a wig shoot people’s faces off for hours every day, but next to a pop culture giant like Kanye West, a successful Twitch streamer is a microcelebrity. Well, until this year.

2018 saw the rise of the world’s first game for the meme generation: Fortnite. And it exploded with the force of The Dress, multiplied by a thousand. The battle royale shooter was not necessarily the first of its kind, or even the best of its kind. But it didn’t have to be. Instead, Fortnite opted for accessibility by giving its candy-colored island away for free. And, more importantly, Fortnite borrowed from wherever it could, as fast as it could. Is the internet obsessed with something today? The developers will make a joke about it in-game tomorrow. It’s the closest thing we have to a video game that keeps up with endless scroll, and the only one that has provided us with a language as universal as the GIF. You would not believe the places I’ve seen people just bust out into a floss. (For example, in the middle of a dark alleyway.) Fortnite’s main export is not gameplay, but culture. It’s a game that just happens to have a sense of humor, and a penchant for spectacle.

For VR enthusiasts, 2016 feels like a long time ago. That was the year that virtual reality hype hit its peak with the launch of three major headsets and accompanying platforms — Facebook’s Oculus Rift, HTC and Valve’s Vive, and Sony’s PlayStation VR. All three systems had their pros and cons, and it turned out that none of them would change the world.

But while Oculus’ future is unclear and HTC has turned to China, enterprise markets, and the ultra high-end, PlayStation VR has quietly established itself as the strongest platform for most people. VR gaming still has the same drawbacks it did two years ago, and Sony hasn’t done much to solve any of them. What it has done, is provide a reasonably convenient home for what has turned into an increasingly impressive stream of games.

2018 has been a good year for video games. From blockbuster epics to smaller indie experiences to inventive takes on VR, the breadth and variety of games that came out over the last 12 months is astounding. To celebrate, Verge staff members are writing essays on their own personal favorite games, and what made them stand out above the crowd.

How could I pick a single favorite game of this year? 2018 has been incredible — for my money even better than 2017 overall. Monster Hunter World was a masterful update to my favorite series; I can’t get Red Dead Redemption 2 out of my head; Celeste is one of the tightest 2D games ever made. Those are just the first three that come to mind, but I’ve played 14 out of the 15 games on Andrew’s excellent list and basically loved them all.

Over the past few years, podcasts have developed into an incredible medium for long-form reporting and creative fiction, with shows like Serial and Welcome to Nightvale garnering massive mainstream followings.

If you’re a fan of these types of programming, and want more to add to your listening queue, there are 11 of our favorite podcasts that debuted (or ran a new season) this year.

2018 has been a good year for video games. From blockbuster epics to smaller indie experiences to inventive takes on VR, the breadth and variety of games that came out over the last 12 months is astounding. To celebrate, Verge staff members are writing essays on their own personal favorite games, and what made them stand out above the crowd.

For me, the modern superhero video game starts with Batman: Arkham Asylum. The 2009 game from Rocksteady Studios that took a clever story inspired by comic books and infused it with an effortless blend of stealth combat, melee attacks, detective work, and lively gadgets. Punctuated by a series of memorable set pieces, Arkham Asylum created a template I would have been happy to see almost any superhero occupy.

Between Netflix, PBS, and premium pay cable channels like HBO and Showtime, the market for documentaries has become much more robust over the past decade, giving filmmakers genuine hope that their movies might find an audience. But something unusual happened in 2018: A lot of people actually went to see documentaries in theaters… and not just at film festivals, but in arthouses and multiplexes. Won’t You Be My Neighbor?, Three Identical Strangers, RBG, and Free Solo have all made more than $10 million at the U.S. box office, which are blockbuster-level numbers for a documentary. Meanwhile, Shirkers on Netflix and Minding the Gap on Hulu drew almost as much attention from critics as the service’s scripted shows.

In short, 2018 has been a phenomenal year for non-fiction cinema, in both the quality of the work and the excitement it’s generated. The films on the list below run the gamut from “strange but true” stories to impressionistic portraits of a forgotten America, with approaches that range from arty and elliptical to punchy and direct. There are movies here about crime, poverty, racism, and neglect, but also honest explorations of family ties, and poignant contemplations about what it means to be a good person. There’s a doc here for almost everybody, in other words — and this year, judging by the box-office receipts, everybody has been finding one to watch.

Fortnite was far and away the biggest game of 2018, despite the fact that it actually debuted in 2017. But its rise to full-blown cultural phenomenon wasn’t exactly expected. In fact, the game started its life as a co-operative survival game where players had to work together to build shelters and fight off zombie hordes. But the “Save the World” mode, as it’s known, never really caught on.

It wasn’t until Fortnite jumped into the burgeoning battle royale scene last September that it took off. Initially seen as a game chasing the success of Playerunknown’s Battlegrounds, Fortnite steadily took over the space. Its free-to-play nature, combined with developer Epic Games’ breakneck update pace, allowed the game to flourish, constantly changing in ways both obvious and unexpected.

2018 has been a good year for video games. From blockbuster epics to smaller indie experiences to inventive takes on VR, the breadth and variety of games that came out over the last 12 months is astounding. To celebrate, Verge staff members are writing essays on their own personal favorite games, and what made them stand out above the crowd.

I’m about to tell you about my favorite game of 2018, Beat Saber — even though I’m a little worried it will ruin my favorite part.

It’s hard to top a year like 2017. Last year saw some of the biggest names in video games reinvented and rejuvenated, from the lush open world of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild to the heart-pounding Resident Evil 7 to the manic wackiness of Super Mario Odyssey. Meanwhile, we were surprised and delighted by brand-new names like PUBG, Horizon Zero Dawn, and Cuphead. There was even a great Sonic the Hedgehog game, which doesn’t happen very often.

But this year was also surprisingly strong, offering up an incredibly varied mix of interactive experiences. There are the blockbusters, of course, like the free-wheeling Spider-Man and the meticulously detailed Red Dead Redemption 2. But 2018 was also a fantastic year for smaller games. Florence used interactivity to show what it feels to fall in love, and Return of the Obra Dinn is perhaps the best whodunit to ever grace the medium. Meanwhile, Tetris Effect made the case that stacking blocks can be an emotional experience.

At this point, it’s a cliché to complain that there’s too much television and not enough time to watch it all. But the fact that it’s a cliché doesn’t make it any less true. The stories about how overwhelming this era of “peak TV” feels began years ago, and the number of shows in production has only continued to increase. But what really hammers the point home isn’t the growing list of everything we watch in a year, but the even longer list of everything we’ve been meaning to get around to.

It’s impossible to even keep up with the existence of all the new shows, let alone actually watch them. Even as someone who literally spends two-thirds of the day in front of a TV, and obsessively tracks premiere dates on three separate calendars, I’ve still been caught off guard when logging onto Netflix and seeing a trailer for the second season of a show I’d never heard of. (Sick Note has been duly noted; I’ll get around to it in 2020.) On one hand, it’s wonderful to have so many options, especially when those options mean more diverse creators and stories. But on the other hand, it means that so much good stuff goes completely overlooked.

One of the more underrated perks of the “peak TV” era is that because there’s so much worth watching, no two television devotees will forge the same path through the mountains of programming. Below is a list of 20 outstanding series and miniseries that aired in 2018. These are well-crafted and entertaining shows, highly recommended and worthy of just about anyone’s time. Some of the names will be familiar; some may be surprising. Taken as a whole, this list is intended to present just one way of looking at what makes TV great. But that perspective is, inevitably, limited.

Here, for example, is just a partial list of shows and specials that could’ve easily landed in this Top 20: America to Me, Barry, Bob’s Burgers, Brockmire, Brooklyn Nine-Nine, Castle Rock, Counterpart, Detroiters, The Deuce, Get Shorty, Haunting of Hill House, Jane the Virgin, Jesus Christ Superstar, Making It, My Brilliant Friend, One Day at a Time, Superstore, The Tale, Waco, and Young Sheldon. That’s an entire alternate 20 right there. It wouldn’t be too hard to come up with 20 more.

2018 was a banner year for comics. Manga ranged from blockbuster action franchises, like Kohei Horikoshi’s My Hero Academia, to mournful reflections on gender non-conformity, like Riyoko Ikeda’s Claudine. Kids gobbled up the latest installments of Dav Pilkey’s Dog Man, Svetlana Chmakova’s Berrybrook Middle School, and Kazu Kibuishi’s Amulet. The garden of indie comics blossomed with creators new and old who experimented with genre, form, and style.

As a retailer in her third year of funnybook slinging, I serviced a public both conversant and curious, familiar with old standbys like Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home and eager to tackle what’s new from Ngozi Ukazu. If they made one thing clear, it is this: comics has a canon, and it’s growing all the time. 2018 exemplified that more than ever, and paring its plethora down to 10 representatives was no mean feat. But for old-timers, neophytes, and casual flippers alike, I present it to you: 10 sterling stand-outs in a year chockfull of them. Enjoy them, share them, and get ready for more.