The Best Movie Of Each Year From 1925-2025

8. 2018 - Spider-Man: Into The Spider-Verse

Spider-Man Into The Spider-Verse
Sony Pictures Releasing

Honourable Mentions: Black KkKLansman, Hereditary, The Favourite

As custodians of the Spider-Man IP in film, Sony had a pretty rough time across the 2010s. Sam Raimi's Spider-Man era was long over (a self-inflicted wound on the studio's behalf), and its reboot replacement failed to yield similar critical highs. The prospect of the studio producing a masterpiece worthy of not only rivalling Raimi's films, but potentially eclipsing them, was next to none.

But then Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse came along and laid down a claim for being one of the greatest pieces of western animation of the century, if not all time.

In what was a bumper year for Marvel's webslinger - with Peter Parker getting the spotlight in Avengers: Endgame and Marvel's Spider-Man for the PlayStation 4 - Spider-Verse proved to be the cherry on top (the cherry in this instance being so delicious that it makes you forget about whatever tasty morsel it was you were eating in the first place). Sony Pictures Animation were able to produce an adaptation that lived up to the scope and potential of Marvel artists Steve Ditko, Jack Kirby, and John Romita Sr., carrying forward Spider-Man's gargantuan legacy by pulling from the Miles Morales comics created by Brian Bendis and Sara Pichelli.

 
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Content Producer/Presenter

WhatCulture's very own resident movie guy, Ewan has been working in the content creation biz for over 10 years now, having started as a freelance contributor to WhatCulture Gaming all the way back in 2015. After graduating with a First-Class Honours in History from Northumbria University in 2017 (where he won a prize for a totally killer dissertation on the Watergate years), Ewan took on the role of Comics Editor at WhatCulture and quickly developed WhatCulture Comics into one of the biggest superhero-focused channels on YouTube. He followed this with a brief hiatus at Screen Rant in 2021, where he worked across the Gaming and Film sections as a writer and editor, before returning to WhatCulture as a Senior Content Producer / Presenter in 2023. He started his own podcast, We Love Dad Movies, in 2022, and has contributed several written pieces to the Eisner-nominated comics website Shelfdust as well. In his current role, Ewan incorporates his love of cinema, comic books, and history into written pieces and video essays for WhatCulture's Film & TV channel, as well as WhatCulture Gaming and WhatCulture Horror, with a particular focus on nineties-era Dad Movies, old school Westerns, and Golden Age Hollywood Noir. John Carpenter is his fave, and he thinks Batman Beyond should never have been cancelled. If that's your vibe, you'll probably like his stuff.