Film · 1980 · Films · 1980s
Airplane!
Scored from 532 calibrated IMDb reviewers, each re-centered on their own rating baseline before the title is ranked. Cohort: Films · 1980s (3,141 peers).
Summary
Ted Striker, a former combat pilot who has been unable to fly since a wartime mission went wrong, buys a seat on Trans American Flight 209 out of Los Angeles to talk Elaine Dickinson, the stewardess who has just left him, into coming back. When the fish served at dinner poisons the cockpit crew and half the cabin, Striker is the only person aboard who can land the plane, talked down by radio by Rex Kramer, the commander who has never forgiven him for the men lost on that mission. Written and directed by Jim Abrahams and David and Jerry Zucker, it is a deadpan gag-per-second parody that lifts its plot from the 1957 drama Zero Hour!, starring Robert Hays, Julie Hagerty, Leslie Nielsen and Robert Stack.
Airplane! is a 1980 comedy film starring Robert Hays, Julie Hagerty and Leslie Nielsen. Jim Abrahams and David Zucker directed it. Its certificate is PG. It runs 1h 28m. Inside comedy it is classed as Goofy. Its country of origin is listed as the United States.
The calibrated figure is built from 532 reviewers whose rating history varies enough to place their own average. A broader pool of 552 reviewers with two or more reviews feeds the raw-average track instead. Rotten Tomatoes carries a separate audience for the same title, 11,300 of whom clear the calibration test. The cohort it is ranked inside is 1980s films — 3,141 of them.
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 Airplane! 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 · 1980s (3,141 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 532.
Cohort: Films · 1980s
