Film · 2003 · Films · 2000s
Bad Santa
Scored from 400 calibrated IMDb reviewers, each re-centered on their own rating baseline before the title is ranked. Cohort: Films · 2000s (7,847 peers).
Summary
A foul-mouthed, alcoholic con man and his dwarf partner pose as a department store Santa and his elf each Christmas season, using the job to case the stores and rob their safes on Christmas Eve. As another heist approaches, his bitter routine is disrupted by a lonely, bullied kid who mistakes him for the real Santa, forcing him to confront what's left of his humanity.
Bad Santa is a 2003 comedy, crime and drama film. Inside comedy it is classed as Dark Comedy.
The cohort it is ranked inside is 2000s films — 7,847 of them. Rotten Tomatoes carries a separate audience for the same title, 5,845 of whom clear the calibration test. The calibrated figure is built from 400 reviewers whose rating history varies enough to place their own average. A broader pool of 413 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 Bad Santa 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 · 2000s (7,847 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 400.
Cohort: Films · 2000s
