Film · 1994 · Films · 1990s
Black Beauty
Scored from 43 calibrated IMDb reviewers, each re-centered on their own rating baseline before the title is ranked. Cohort: Films · 1990s (4,082 peers).
Summary
Narrated by the horse himself, this adaptation of Anna Sewell's novel follows a black colt born on an English farm in the Victorian era through a succession of owners. At Birtwick Park he is a favourite of Squire Gordon and the stable boy Joe Green and forms friendships with the ill-used mare Ginger and the pony Merrylegs; when the household breaks up he is sold on to an estate that uses the punishing bearing rein, then to a horse dealer, then to a London cab driver named Jerry Barker. Beauty's fortunes rise and fall with the character of whoever holds his reins. Caroline Thompson's family drama, her debut as a director, keeps the book's first-person animal narration.
Black Beauty is a 1994 adventure, drama and family film. It runs 1h 27m. It was made in the United Kingdom. It is rated G.
The cohort it is ranked inside is 1990s films — 4,082 of them. Only 43 of its IMDb reviewers rate with enough spread for a personal baseline to be measured, so the calibrated figure rests on a thin sample; a broader pool of 44 reviewers with at least two reviews feeds the raw-average track. A second review pool sits behind it as well: 1 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 Black Beauty 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 · 1990s (4,082 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 43.
Cohort: Films · 1990s
