Film · 1989 · Films · 1980s
Do the Right Thing
Scored from 466 calibrated IMDb reviewers, each re-centered on their own rating baseline before the title is ranked. Cohort: Films · 1980s (3,141 peers).
Summary
Set on the hottest day of summer in a Brooklyn neighborhood, racial tensions escalate when a local Italian-American pizzeria becomes the flashpoint for conflict between the store's owner and the predominantly Black community surrounding it.
Released in 1989, Do the Right Thing is a drama and comedy film. It runs 2h. Its country of origin is listed as the United States. Spike Lee, Danny Aiello and Samuel L. Jackson head the billed cast. Spike Lee directed it. Its certificate is R.
The calibrated figure is built from 466 reviewers whose rating history varies enough to place their own average. A broader pool of 479 reviewers with two or more reviews feeds the raw-average track instead. Rotten Tomatoes carries a separate audience for the same title, 3,023 of whom clear the calibration test. 3,140 other films from the 1980s 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 Do the Right Thing 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 · 1980s (3,141 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 466.
Cohort: Films · 1980s
