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Milestones and Turning Points in Film History The Year 2018 |
 Timeline of Greatest Film History Milestones and Turning Points (by decade and year) Introduction | Pre-1900s | 1900s | 1910s | 1920s | 1930s | 1940s | 1950s 1960s | 1970s | 1980s | 1990s | 2000s | 2010s | 2020s |
| Event and Significance | |
| The domestic box-office totals reached $11.9 billion for the first time (that was almost 7% more than the previous year). It also smashed the record of $11.38 billion set in 2016. This was attributed mostly to a few massive blockbuster hits, including Disney's/Marvel's Black Panther (2018), Disney's Avengers: Infinity War (2018), Disney's/Pixar's Incredibles 2 (2018), Universal's Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom (2018), and Fox's Deadpool 2 (2018). Understandably, Disney took 26% of the year’s market share at $3.092 billion, for 13 films (including ten new releases). | |
| The worldwide box-office totals for 2018 were a whopping $41.7 billion (a 2.7% increase over 2017). In all, 54 films in 2018 finished with more than $100 million in global (or international) box office. | |
| 300 Hollywood women signed an initiative known as "Time's Up" to fight sexual harassment. | |
| According to Variety, the millennials age-category (aged 22 to 37 years) was among the age group of 18-44 year olds who accounted for 64.4% of paid-ticket moviegoers. | |
| Ava DuVernay became the first black (or non-white) woman to direct a live-action film with a $100 million or more budget, Disney's family adventure, A Wrinkle in Time (2018). DuVernay was also the first African-American woman to direct a film that earned at least $100 million domestically. | |
| According to Variety, 14% of the directors of the top 100-grossing movies in 2018 were black, according to a report by the USC Annenberg Inclusion Initiative. That represented a 270% increase over 2017 and a 200% increase from 2007 in terms of representation. It was partly the result of grassroots campaigns such as #OscarsSoWhite, that brought public attention to the lack of representation in Hollywood. For example, Ryan Coogler's Black Panther (2018), Spike Lee's BlacKkKlansman (2018), and Steven Caple Jr.'s Creed II (2018) were all critical and commercial successes. Among the major distributors, Warner Bros. was the only studio without a single 2018 release from a black director. Women continued to be given even fewer directing opportunities than men. Only four of the top 100-grossing movies in 2018 were helmed by female directors — Kay Cannon (Blockers (2018)), Abby Kohn (I Feel Pretty (2018)), Susanna Fogel (The Spy Who Dumped Me (2018)), and Ava DuVernay (A Wrinkle in Time (2018)). | |
| The annual USC's Annenberg Inclusion Initiative, a study about on-screen diversity, released its findings that there has been almost no change in the number of women, people of color, and LGBT characters depicted on screen in the last decade. Since 2007, the initiative examined every speaking or named character shown on screen in the top 100 films for each year at the domestic box office. | |
| Peter Ramsey became the first black director to win the Best Animated Feature Film Academy Award for Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018). The animated feature was the first Marvel film nominated for Best Animated Feature. | |
| The major box-office bomb of the year was the co-produced US/NZ post-apocalyptic adventure film Mortal Engines (2018). Its exorbitant budget of over $100 million dwarfed its worldwide revenue gross of $83 million, and made it a big money-loser. | |
| The average ticket price in North America rose to $9.38 over the summer, increasing 43 cents from the year prior. | |
| Disney's/Marvel's Black Panther (2018), the 18th release in Marvel's Cinematic Universe, had the the fifth largest three-day domestic opening gross in cinematic history at $202 million, and finished around $242 million for the four-day holiday weekend. It was the highest debut ever for a February film. It became the #1 comic book adaptation of all-time, and the top-grossing film in history by a black director (Ryan Coogler). Incidentally, it was Marvel's first film directed by an African-American, and it featured a largely black cast. It was the biggest non-Star Wars opener since Jurassic World (2015) (that had a prime June or summer blockbuster release date, with $208.8 million). It was the second biggest opening for a Marvel Studios film, only slightly behind Marvel's The Avengers (2012) (at $207 million), and marked the studio's 18th straight number one opening. By the end of March 2018, it had bypassed the total box-office (domestic) of The Avengers (2012) (at $623.3 million) - and eventually attained $700 million in total - and was the box-office champ for the year. It was also the third highest-grossing film of all time in the US, just behind Avatar (2009) at $760.5 million (domestic), and Star Wars: Episode VII - The Force Awakens (2015) at $936.7 million (domestic). | |
| Black Panther (2018) became the first superhero movie to be nominated for Best Picture. The domestic box-office total for the superhero film, $700.5 million, was virtually the same as the domestic total made by all nine of the Best Picture nominees in the years 2016 and 2017! It scored three Oscar wins for Best Costume Design, Best Production Design and Best Original Score. It was Marvel's first black superhero standalone film; it was an historic achievement that a film in Marvel's Cinematic Universe had now won its first three Oscars - and two were also exceptional. The winner in the category of Best Production Design, Hannah Beachler, became the first African-American to win in the category. And the winner for Best Costume Design, Ruth Carter, was also the first black person to win the Oscar in her category. | |
| Netflix's and Alfonso Cuarón's moving 1970s, grim Spanish-language period-piece Roma (Mex/US) received a whopping 10 nominations and scored three wins for Best Cinematography (Cuaron), Best Director (Cuaron), and Best Foreign Language Film. Cuaron's film was the first Netflix project to be nominated in the Best Picture category. With nominations for Yalitza Aparicio and Marina de Tavira, it marked the first time two Latina (or Mexican-born) actresses were nominated in the same year. Aparicio was only the fourth Latina Best Actress nominee in Oscar history, while de Tavira was the second Best Supporting Actress nominated for a Foreign Language performance. Mexican actress Yalitza Aparicio was also the first indigenous woman nominated for Best Actress. The film's 10 nominations tied it with Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000, China/US/HK/Taiwan) for the most nominations ever received for a Foreign Language film. Roma was only the 11th non-English-language film ever nominated for Best Picture. Cuaron's win for Best Cinematography made him the first director to win the Oscar for shooting his own film. Cuaron's win also marked the fifth time in six years that a Mexican filmmaker had taken the director's prize. And finally, Roma’s Best Picture nomination marked the first time a woman (producer Gabriela Rodriguez) from any Latin American country had been nominated for the award. | |
| Melissa McCarthy became the second performer to be nominated for two contrasting lead actress awards in the same year: the Best Actress Oscar for Can You Ever Forgive Me? (2018), and Worst Actress Razzie Award for The Happytime Murders (2018) and Life of the Party (2018). [Note: The first instance was by Sandra Bullock in 2009, who won in both instances.] | |
| The Best Picture winner was Universal's Green Book (2018) by un-nominated director Peter Farrelly and co-writer Nick Vallelonga. The controversial and polarizing 60's race-relations biopic (with 5 nominations and three wins for Best Supporting Actor, Best Original Screenplay, and Best Picture) had story parallels to Best Picture winner Driving Miss Daisy (1989). It marked only the 5th time in Oscar history that the director of the top film, Peter Farrelly, was not nominated for Best Director. | |
| Actor Sam Rockwell's nomination for his role as President George Bush in the political biopic Vice (2018) was the first instance of an actor nominated for portraying a living US President, Bush 43. | |
| Four powerful franchise films appeared
in the May-June time-frame of early summer, to turn around the box-office
slumps of the past: - Disney-Marvel's Avengers: Infinity War (2018) - the 19th film in Marvel's Cinematic Universe - Disney-LucasFilm's Solo: A Star Wars Story (2018), the second stand-alone Star Wars spinoff after Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016) - Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom (2018), the fifth film in the dinosaur franchise following Jurassic World (2015) - Fox's Deadpool 2 (2018) with Ryan Reynolds reprising the wisecracking superhero as part of the X-Men franchise after the wildly-successful Deadpool (2016) |
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| Four other films released in late spring to mid-summer of 2018 were successful sequels or continuation stories: Warner Bros.' Ocean's 8 (2018) (following the trilogy from 2001-2007), Disney/Pixar's Incredibles 2 (2018) - a sequel 14 years later, Disney-Marvel's Ant-Man and the Wasp (2018) - the 20th film in Marvel's Cinematic Universe and the sequel to Ant-Man (2015), and Paramount's Mission: Impossible 6 - Fallout (2018). | |
| It appeared that Hollywood studios were attempting to avoid cannibalizing each other during the normal summer months of blockbuster releases. Rather than one blockbuster period, there were four time spans in 2018 that broke records: February (Black Panther), April (Avengers: Infinity War and A Quiet Place), June (Incredibles 2 and Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom), and October (Venom and A Star Is Born). December could also be added to this, with two powerful year-end releases: Aquaman and Mary Poppins Returns. | |
| The Disney-Marvel film, Avengers: Infinity War (2018) - the 19th film in Marvel's Cinematic Universe, became the fastest film ever to cross $1 billion dollars globally - in only 11 days of release. It was the sixth Marvel film to reach that number. At the same time, Disney crossed the $3 billion mark for 2018, breaking its own record for the shortest time to reach that landmark in a given year. Avengers: Infinity War (2018) was also the longest Marvel movie to date at a run time of 2 hours and 36 minutes. The film eventually earned $678.8 million (domestic), just behind Black Panther (2018). | |
| 71 year-old actress Glenn Close became the most-nominated living actor to have never won an Oscar (now with seven nominations, including 4 Best Actress nominations), with her Academy Award nomination for her role as devoted, accommodating and repressed wife Joan Castleman, in director Björn Runge's and Sony Pictures Classics' independent film drama The Wife (2018). Close's numerous other nominations included three Best Actress nominations: Fatal Attraction (1987), Dangerous Liaisons (1988), and Albert Nobbs (2011), and three Best Supporting Actress nominations: The World According to Garp (1982), The Big Chill (1983), and The Natural (1984). [Note: To date, Richard Burton tied Close with seven nominations, but the record was held by Peter O'Toole with eight nominations and no wins.] | |
| Competing streaming company Hulu in 2018 surpassed the 20 million US subscriber mark, for both its live pay-TV package and standalone on-demand services. Also in 2018, Hulu announced a multi-year deal with DreamWorks Animation, giving it exclusive U.S. streaming rights for the studio’s library titles, new releases starting in 2019, and new original series to bow in 2020. [In the past, exclusive studio rights would have gone to premium cable networks.] Hulu's "virtual" pay-TV service, offered 50-plus channels including ABC, CBS, Fox and NBC in most markets. In addition, Hulu said that 78% of viewing on the service took place on Internet-connected TVs. However, in 2018, Netflix remained a major competitor, with more than double the amount of Hulu's US streaming subscribers (56.7 million). | |
| Pixar's 20th feature film, Incredibles 2 (2018) at 1 hour and 58 minutes was not only the longest Pixar Animation Studios film to date, but also the longest computer-animated feature film to date. Its debut set the record for the Best Debut for an Animated Film in its opening weekend ($182.7 million domestic), besting Finding Dory (2016) at $135 million (domestic). Eventually, it earned $608.6 million (domestic) and became the highest-grossing animated release of all-time domestically, surpassing Finding Dory (2016). It was the highest-grossing PG-rated movie of all-time, and the # 1 (domestic) film of the Pixar branded-series. | |
| The Mr. Rogers' biopic-documentary Won't You Be My Neighbor? (2018) became the top-grossing biographical documentary ever. It gained that distinction when it easily bypassed the $8.4 million total of Amy (2015) - about Amy Winehouse. The feel-good, uplifting, nostalgic biographical film about PBS' icon was the highest-grossing documentary film in five years (at a total domestic of $22.6 million), after Morgan Spurlock's earlier One Direction: This Is Us (2013) (at $28.9 million domestic). However, it was not one of the five nominees for the Best Documentary Feature Film category at the Oscars. | |
| Popular actor Burt Reynolds passed away from cardiac arrest at the age of 82. His career began with appearances in TV shows in the 60s and early 70s, including Gunsmoke, Hawk, and Dan August. He really gained fame for his break-out role in John Boorman's action film Deliverance (1972). Other successful films during his long career included his first car-chase film White Lightning (1973), the football classic The Longest Yard (1974), Smokey and the Bandit (1977) and its 1980 sequel, Semi-Tough (1977), Hooper (1978), The Cannonball Run (1981), Striptease (1996), and Boogie Nights (1997) for which he earned a Best Supporting Actor Oscar nomination for his role as porn director Jack Horner. | |
| Marvel legend, writer, editor, and publisher, and Spider-Man, X-Men, and Avengers creator Stan Lee died at the age of 95. | |
There were many lesser-known but notable
movie actors/actresses, directors/writers that died in 2018:
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| One of the rare Hollywood studio films in which all the main actors were of Asian descent was director Jon M. Chu's Crazy Rich Asians (2018). It was the first studio film in twenty-five years to star Asian American actors in leading roles. The very popular, glitzy romantic comedy was adapted from Kevin Kwan's best-selling book, and starred Constance Wu, Henry Golding, Awkwafina and Michelle Yeoh. It was hoped that it would spark a movement for greater Asian American representation in Hollywood. | |
| For the first time in Academy Awards history, three of the four acting category Oscar wins went to actors of color, and three of the four wins went to performers in LGBT movies. Two African-Americans (in supporting categories) both won - (1) Mahershala Ali (with his second nomination, and second win in the same category) for Green Book (2018). Ali became the second African-American actor to win two Oscars for acting, joining Denzel Washington, and he became the first black actor to repeat a win in the same category; and (2) Regina King (with her first nomination and first win), for her role in If Beale Street Could Talk (2018). | |
| Director Bryan Singer's and Fox's musical biopic Bohemian Rhapsody (2018), about Queen's lead singer Freddie Mercury (Rami Malek), became the highest-grossing musical biopic and gay/lesbian film of all-time (domestic). Arab-American Rami Malek (of Egyptian descent) became the first Arab American to win the Best Actor Oscar. | |
| The latest (and sixth) film in the long-running spy franchise of Mission: Impossible films (1996-2018) was Mission Impossible - Fallout (2018). It became the highest-grossing (domestic) film of the franchise, at $220.2 million. | |
| The Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences members voted to expel Bill Cosby and Roman Polanski, due to their past histories of being charged with sexual abuse. Comedian Bill Cosby was sentenced to 3-10 years in jail for a 2004 sexual assault. He became the first celebrity to be jailed in the #MeToo era. | |
| The Academy of Motion Pictures revealed its decision to begin a new "Achievement in Popular Film" category for the Oscars. It was obviously an effort to increase audience share (and boost sagging ratings and declining viewership) and to be more inclusive -- parallel to the Academy's move to vastly expand the diversity of its membership. Soon afterwards, it announced that it was postponing the plan. It was a strange idea that blockbuster box-office results could become the new criteria for a 90-year-old award reportedly given on merit. In fact, the new category might confuse the Best Picture race for both a worthy big-studio, crowd-pleasing blockbuster and Best Picture contender such as Black Panther (2018) or A Star is Born (2018). | |
| In an unusual move, former US president Barack Obama and Michelle Obama signed a deal with Netflix to produce films and series. | |
| According to Forbes, Scarlett Johansson was the world's best-paid actress of the year earning $40.5 million, while. George Clooney was the world's highest-paid actor in the past year with an industry-leading pretax paycheck of $239 million in the calendar year between June 1, 2017 and June 1, 2018. | |
| Director Spike Lee's and Universal's (Focus Features) white-supremacist critique and period drama BlacKkKlansman (2018) (with 6 nominations, and one win for Best Adapted Screenplay) marked Spike Lee's first competitive Oscar win in over three decades. Also, Lee became the sixth African-American nominated as Best Director for the film. | |
| Actor Bradley Cooper's directorial debut film of the musical drama A Star is Born (2018) from Warner Bros., starring Lady Gaga and Cooper himself, was the fourth adaptation of the musical romance (it had been made in 1937, 1954, and 1976). It made a powerful showing with $210.9+ million (domestic). | |
| Actor/director John Krasinski's post-apocalyptic, supernatural horror-thriller A Quiet Place (2018) was the highest-grossing (domestic) horror picture of the year (at $188 million). Close behind was the direct sequel to the original classic horror/slasher film Halloween (1978), a reboot from Universal also titled Halloween (2018) - the 11th installment in the Halloween series with a domestic total of $159.3 million. It was the highest-grossing (domestic) film of the entire Halloween franchise and became the highest-grossing slasher film of all-time. It had a staggering record opening of $77.5 million, the most for a horror film with a female lead - it was the biggest debut of any film with a female lead over 55 years of age in the US. | |
| US hunter/poacher David Berry Jr. - after pleading guilty - was sentenced to watch the Disney animated film Bambi (1942) repeatedly (once a month) during a year in the Lawrence County prison, for illegally killing hundreds of deer in Missouri. |
