Film · 1981 · Films · 1980s
Excalibur
Scored from 324 calibrated IMDb reviewers, each re-centered on their own rating baseline before the title is ranked. Cohort: Films · 1980s (3,141 peers).
Summary
John Boorman's operatic retelling of the Arthurian legend follows Arthur from his birth through Merlin's machinations, his drawing of the sword Excalibur from the stone, and his rise as king of Britain. As he gathers the Knights of the Round Table and pursues the Holy Grail, his kingdom is threatened by Morgana's sorcery and the doomed love between Lancelot and Guinevere.
Excalibur is a 1981 adventure, drama and fantasy film.
The calibrated figure is built from 324 reviewers whose rating history varies enough to place their own average. A broader pool of 340 reviewers with two or more reviews feeds the raw-average track instead. The cohort it is ranked inside is 1980s films — 3,141 of them. Rotten Tomatoes carries a separate audience for the same title, 1,617 of whom clear the calibration test.
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 Excalibur 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 324.
Cohort: Films · 1980s
