Film · 1988 · Films · 1980s
Akira
Scored from 485 calibrated IMDb reviewers, each re-centered on their own rating baseline before the title is ranked. Cohort: Films · 1980s (3,141 peers).
Summary
In a dystopian Neo-Tokyo recovering from World War III, a street gang member named Kaneda witnesses his friend Tetsuo's near-fatal motorcycle accident. Military authorities capture Tetsuo for mysterious scientific experiments, during which he begins manifesting devastating psychokinetic powers. As Tetsuo's abilities spiral out of control, Kaneda and his allies become entangled in a dangerous conspiracy surrounding a powerful force known as Akira.
Released in 1988, Akira is a science fiction, action and thriller film. Its certificate is R. Its country of origin is listed as Japan. Mitsuo Iwata, Nozomu Sasaki and Taro Ishida head the billed cast. Katsuhiro Ôtomo directed it. It plays in Japanese. It runs 2h 4m.
The cohort it is ranked inside is 1980s films — 3,141 of them. Rotten Tomatoes carries a separate audience for the same title, 7,677 of whom clear the calibration test. The calibrated figure is built from 485 reviewers whose rating history varies enough to place their own average. A broader pool of 503 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 Akira 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 485.
Cohort: Films · 1980s
