Film · 1988 · Films · 1980s
Big
Scored from 241 calibrated IMDb reviewers, each re-centered on their own rating baseline before the title is ranked. Cohort: Films · 1980s (3,141 peers).
Summary
Josh Baskin is a twelve-year-old from suburban New Jersey who is turned away from a carnival ride for being too short, in front of a girl he likes, and wishes on a battered Zoltar fortune-telling machine to be big. He wakes the next morning in the body of a grown man, has to convince his best friend Billy that it is really him, and hides out in New York City while the two of them hunt for the machine. A data-entry job at the MacMillan toy company turns into a rapid promotion once the owner discovers how well the new hire understands what children actually want to play with. Penny Marshall's comedy stars Tom Hanks as the adult Josh.
Big is a 1988 comedy, drama and fantasy film. Its country of origin is listed as the United States. Inside comedy it is classed as Dramedy. Its certificate is PG. It runs 1h 44m.
Its in-cohort standing is measured against the other 3,140 1980s films, not against the whole corpus. The calibrated figure is built from 241 reviewers whose rating history varies enough to place their own average. A broader pool of 248 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 Big 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 241.
Cohort: Films · 1980s
