Film · 1978 · Films · 1970s
Blue Collar
Scored from 57 calibrated IMDb reviewers, each re-centered on their own rating baseline before the title is ranked. Cohort: Films · 1970s (2,406 peers).
Summary
Paul Schrader's first film as director puts three Detroit auto-plant workers — Zeke Brown, Jerry Bartowski, and Smokey James — on an assembly line that is grinding them down while their union local shrugs at broken lockers and unsafe machines. Buried in debt, tax trouble, and bills they cannot pay, the three decide to rob the safe at union headquarters, expecting a quiet payday. What they find instead is a ledger documenting the local's illegal loan-sharking, and the decision to use it as leverage draws the attention of men with far more practice at this than they have. The drama tracks how fast the friendship between them curdles once the pressure arrives.
Blue Collar (1978) is a film IMDb files under the crime and drama genres. It is rated R. It was made in the United States. The runtime is 114 minutes.
Its in-cohort standing is measured against the other 2,405 1970s films, not against the whole corpus. A second review pool sits behind it as well: 132 Rotten Tomatoes reviewers clear the same calibration test, and Rankquant scores them separately. Only 57 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 60 reviewers with at least two reviews feeds the raw-average track.
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 Blue Collar 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 · 1970s (2,406 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 57.
Cohort: Films · 1970s
