Film · 1999 · Films · 1990s
But I'm a Cheerleader
Scored from 154 calibrated IMDb reviewers, each re-centered on their own rating baseline before the title is ranked. Cohort: Films · 1990s (4,082 peers).
Summary
A peppy high school cheerleader is sent to a conversion therapy camp called True Directions after her family and friends suspect she is a lesbian. Surrounded by other teens being coached through rigid gender roles and a five-step program to become straight, she begins questioning the program and discovers her real feelings for a fellow camper.
But I'm a Cheerleader is a 1999 comedy, drama and romance film. Inside comedy it is classed as Satire.
The calibrated figure is built from 154 reviewers whose rating history varies enough to place their own average. A broader pool of 162 reviewers with two or more reviews feeds the raw-average track instead. Its in-cohort standing is measured against the other 4,081 1990s films, not against the whole corpus.
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 But I'm a Cheerleader 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 154.
Cohort: Films · 1990s
