Film · 1974 · Films · 1970s
Dark Star
Scored from 168 calibrated IMDb reviewers, each re-centered on their own rating baseline before the title is ranked. Cohort: Films · 1970s (2,406 peers).
Summary
In the distant future, the bored and demoralized crew of the scout ship Dark Star drift through deep space on a mission to destroy unstable planets in star systems slated for future colonization. As their long voyage wears on their sanity, malfunctions mount, including a temperamental alien mascot loose in the ship and a thermostellar bomb that begins contemplating its own existence before it is due to detonate.
Released in 1974, Dark Star is a comedy and science-fiction film. Inside comedy it is classed as Dark Comedy.
The cohort it is ranked inside is 1970s films — 2,406 of them. Rotten Tomatoes carries a separate audience for the same title, 612 of whom clear the calibration test. The calibrated figure is built from 168 reviewers whose rating history varies enough to place their own average. A broader pool of 172 reviewers with two or more reviews feeds the raw-average track instead.
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 Dark Star 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 168.
Cohort: Films · 1970s
