Film · 2013 · Films · 2010s
Bad Words
Scored from 152 calibrated IMDb reviewers, each re-centered on their own rating baseline before the title is ranked. Cohort: Films · 2010s (13,059 peers).
Summary
A bitter 40-year-old man exploits a loophole to enter a prestigious national spelling bee meant for children, intent on winning it for reasons he refuses to explain. As he steamrolls competitors and clashes with organizers and parents, he forms an unlikely friendship with a precocious young Indian-American contestant.
Bad Words is a 2013 comedy and drama film. Its comedy subtype is Dark Comedy.
13,058 other films from the 2010s form the cohort it is ranked inside. 152 IMDb reviewers rate with enough spread for a personal baseline to be measured, and those are the ones the calibrated score reads; a separate, broader pool of 155 reviewers with at least two reviews each feeds the raw-average track. A second review pool sits behind it as well: 1,097 Rotten Tomatoes reviewers clear the same calibration test, and Rankquant scores them separately.
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 Words 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 152.
Cohort: Films · 2010s
