Film · 2016 · Films · 2010s
A Hologram for the King
Scored from 162 calibrated IMDb reviewers, each re-centered on their own rating baseline before the title is ranked. Cohort: Films · 2010s (13,059 peers).
Summary
A struggling American businessman travels to Saudi Arabia to pitch a holographic teleconferencing system to the king, hoping the deal will salvage his finances and his life. While waiting endlessly for the elusive monarch to appear, he forms an unlikely friendship with his eccentric local driver and develops a connection with a Saudi doctor, finding unexpected personal renewal in the desert.
Released in 2016, A Hologram for the King is a comedy, drama and romance film.
The cohort it is ranked inside is 2010s films — 13,059 of them. Rotten Tomatoes carries a separate audience for the same title, 267 of whom clear the calibration test. The calibrated figure is built from 162 reviewers whose rating history varies enough to place their own average. A broader pool of 167 reviewers with two or more reviews feeds the raw-average track instead.
How the score was built
We compare the reviewers of this title against every other title those same people reviewed. Each review is scored relative to the reviewer's own baseline — a 7/10 from a hard grader sits well above their average, while a 7/10 from a generous grader sits below theirs. Every reviewer then counts the same, so the result is a calibrated consensus rather than a raw average.
- Global percentile
- Where A Hologram for the King lands against every title we rank.
- In-cohort percentile
- The same comparison narrowed to its cohort — titles of the same format released in the same decade. A 1970s film is judged against 1970s films, not against last year's streaming series. Ranked against Films · 2010s (13,059 titles).
- AI-adjusted percentile
- The same reviewer-normalized score, corrected for how much confidence the sample supports: thin samples are pulled toward the corpus average. Each title keeps the share n / (n + 53) of its measured distance from the average, where n is its calibrated-reviewer count, and the result is ranked on the same scale as the global percentile.53 is the median sample size across everything we rank. Here n is 162.
Cohort: Films · 2010s
