Film · 1989 · Films · 1980s
Great Balls of Fire!
Scored from 61 calibrated IMDb reviewers, each re-centered on their own rating baseline before the title is ranked. Cohort: Films · 1980s (3,141 peers).
Summary
A biographical account of rock and roll pioneer Jerry Lee Lewis, chronicling his rise to fame and the personal controversies that marked his career.
Released in 1989, Great Balls of Fire! is a biography, drama and music film. Its certificate is PG-13. It runs 1h 48m. Its country of origin is listed as the United States.
3,140 other films from the 1980s form the cohort it is ranked inside. Rotten Tomatoes carries a separate audience for the same title, 450 of whom clear the calibration test. Only 61 of its IMDb reviewers rate with enough spread for a personal baseline to be measured, so the calibrated figure rests on a thin sample; a broader pool of 64 reviewers with at least two reviews feeds the raw-average track.
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 Great Balls of Fire! 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 61.
Cohort: Films · 1980s
