Film · 2015 · Films · 2010s
Black Mass
Scored from 372 calibrated IMDb reviewers, each re-centered on their own rating baseline before the title is ranked. Cohort: Films · 2010s (13,059 peers).
Summary
In 1970s South Boston, notorious Irish-American gangster James 'Whitey' Bulger becomes an informant for the FBI, partnering with childhood friend and agent John Connolly to take down a rival Italian mob. The unholy alliance allows Bulger to expand his own criminal empire largely unchecked, leaving a trail of corruption and violence in its wake.
Black Mass is a 2015 biography, crime and drama film.
The calibrated figure is built from 372 reviewers whose rating history varies enough to place their own average. A broader pool of 380 reviewers with two or more reviews feeds the raw-average track instead. 13,058 other films from the 2010s form the cohort it is ranked inside. Rotten Tomatoes carries a separate audience for the same title, 1,803 of whom clear the calibration test.
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 Mass 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 372.
Cohort: Films · 2010s
