The Year We Fell Back In Love With Romantic Comedies

The past 12 months were just a year, standing in front of an audience, asking them to love it.

Finally.

After being dormant for too long, romantic comedies trended way up in 2018, a year that saw Netflix embrace the genre previously left behind by Hollywood movie studios and networks chasing superheroes, stranger things, games of thrones, and star wars. Things had gotten so bleak, in fact, that we forgot how much simple joy could be found from two unlikely people sparking a connection at work or through a contrived arrangement that inevitably leads them to make out in a hot tub before a misunderstanding tears them apart.

Discover your new favorite show: Watch This Now!

The year of the rom-com started in the spring with the arrival of Alex Strangelove, Netflix's version of Love, Simon, basically, where a young high school boy (Daniel Doheny) has to come to grips with his evolving sexuality and realize he's gay. Shortly after, the streaming service debuted The Kissing Booth with Joey King, Joel Courtney and Jacob Elordi, which, despite some Never Been Kissedvibes, failed to live up to the expectations of its trailer. (No matter to audiences, however, who watched and rewatched this problematic and critically derided film; according to Netflix data, The Kissing Booth was the most rewatched Netflix Film on the platform in 2018.)

That slow start, however, didn't portend things to come. Released in June, Set It Up became one of the most talked-about movies of the summer, exploding conversation about the rom-com renaissance. The office romance put Glenn Powell and Zoey Deutch together as overworked assistants so desperate to escape their overbearing bosses that they team up to match-make their overlords. Naturally, they end up falling in love instead. Deutch and Powell's chemistry elevated Set It Up beyond its premise and the pair's connection recalled Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks. (Powell was a Netflix rom-com MVP this year, also appearing in the charming The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society.)

To All the Boys I've Loved Before Sequel Officially in the Works at Netflix

By August, however, the rom-com reascendance was complete with To All the Boys I've Love Before. The high school instant classic, based on the YA novel of the same name by Jenny Han, turned Lana Condor and Noah Centineo into household names and future stars. Condor played the shy Lara Jean Covey, who teams with the dreamy Peter Kavinsky after her secret love letters get out in the world to save her social life. As expected, the pair fall in love and their bubbly, flirtatious exchanges had us using heart eyes for weeks and through numerous re-watches. (To All the Boys I've Loved Before was the second-most rewatched Netflix Film of the year.) Meanwhile, Centineo, who looks like Mark Ruffalo's long-lost son, went nuclear thanks to his performance, unruly hair and thirst-trap Instagram. You couldn't go anywhere in August or September without running into a GIF of the teen lovebirds -- even after the premiere of Centineo's second Netflix rom-com, the slightly lackluster Sierra Burgess Is a Loser, starring Stranger Things' Barb, Shannon Purser.

So what did this year of the rom-com tell us? That people still love hope, for one. Rom-coms at their core are about believing in the best in people, even when they've just shown you their worst (and in every rom-com, the characters turn into demons for a few minutes about 20 minutes before the end). They're also about creating stars people love: Powell, Deutch, Condor, Centineo, King, Courtney, Love, Simon's Nick Robinson, Crazy Rich Asians' Henry Golding and Constance Wu -- that next generation of Hanks' and Ryans' and Julia Roberts' who millennials of all ages will love and follow (on screen and Instagram) for years to come. Before this year, we were in a rom-com-starved state and we didn't even know it. Now we can't imagine going back to the way things were. If that's not a happy ending, then what is?