Film · 1986 · Films · 1980s
Howard the Duck
Scored from 274 calibrated IMDb reviewers, each re-centered on their own rating baseline before the title is ranked. Cohort: Films · 1980s (3,141 peers).
Summary
A wisecracking alien duck from a parallel world is accidentally pulled to Cleveland by a misfired laser experiment. He befriends an aspiring rock singer and a nerdy scientist, and together they must stop a malevolent cosmic entity that arrived through the same beam from taking over Earth.
Released in 1986, Howard the Duck is an action, adventure and comedy film. Its comedy subtype is Goofy.
The cohort it is ranked inside is 1980s films — 3,141 of them. A second review pool sits behind it as well: 2,369 Rotten Tomatoes reviewers clear the same calibration test, and Rankquant scores them separately. 274 IMDb reviewers rate with enough spread for a personal baseline to be measured, and those are the ones the calibrated score reads; a separate, broader pool of 285 reviewers with at least two reviews each 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 Howard the Duck 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 274.
Cohort: Films · 1980s
