Film · 1998 · Films · 1990s
Bulworth
Scored from 148 calibrated IMDb reviewers, each re-centered on their own rating baseline before the title is ranked. Cohort: Films · 1990s (4,082 peers).
Summary
A suicidal, disillusioned U.S. Senator from California takes out a massive life insurance policy and hires a hitman to kill him, freeing him to speak blunt, unfiltered truths on the campaign trail. As he falls in with a young woman from South Central L.A. and adopts a hip-hop persona, his newfound candor about race, money, and politics turns him into an unlikely sensation, and he begins to regret the contract on his life.
Bulworth is a 1998 comedy, drama and romance film. Inside comedy it is classed as Satire.
The calibrated figure is built from 148 reviewers whose rating history varies enough to place their own average. A broader pool of 152 reviewers with two or more reviews feeds the raw-average track instead. Rotten Tomatoes carries a separate audience for the same title, 525 of whom clear the calibration test. 4,081 other films from the 1990s form the cohort it is ranked inside.
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 Bulworth 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 148.
Cohort: Films · 1990s
