Film · 1998 · Films · 1990s
Happiness
Scored from 296 calibrated IMDb reviewers, each re-centered on their own rating baseline before the title is ranked. Cohort: Films · 1990s (4,082 peers).
Summary
Todd Solondz's pitch-black ensemble comedy-drama follows three New Jersey sisters and the troubled people orbiting them, including a lonely obscene phone caller, a seemingly perfect suburban psychiatrist hiding monstrous secrets, and a poet whose life is unraveling. The interwoven stories probe loneliness, denial, and the gap between the lives people present and the ones they actually lead.
Happiness is a 1998 comedy and drama film. Inside comedy it is classed as Dark Comedy.
Rotten Tomatoes carries a separate audience for the same title, 24 of whom clear the calibration test. 4,081 other films from the 1990s form the cohort it is ranked inside. The calibrated figure is built from 296 reviewers whose rating history varies enough to place their own average. A broader pool of 307 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 Happiness 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 296.
Cohort: Films · 1990s
