Film · 2008 · Films · 2000s
Man on Wire
Scored from 147 calibrated IMDb reviewers, each re-centered on their own rating baseline before the title is ranked. Cohort: Films · 2000s (7,847 peers).
Summary
On 7 August 1974 the French wire-walker Philippe Petit stepped onto a cable rigged between the towers of the World Trade Center and spent some forty-five minutes crossing back and forth a quarter of a mile above Manhattan. James Marsh's documentary reconstructs the six years of obsession behind it, from Petit's earlier walks at Notre-Dame and the Sydney Harbour Bridge to the fake IDs and smuggled equipment his accomplices used to get onto the roof. Interviews with Petit and his accomplices are cut with archival footage and black-and-white re-enactments staged like a heist film. The tension lies in an illegal operation that could have come apart at any stage, and in what it cost the friendships behind it.
Released in 2008, Man on Wire is a biography, crime and documentary film. Its certificate is PG-13. Its country of origin is listed as the United Kingdom. It runs 1h 34m.
Rotten Tomatoes carries a separate audience for the same title, 3,156 of whom clear the calibration test. The calibrated figure is built from 147 reviewers whose rating history varies enough to place their own average. A broader pool of 151 reviewers with two or more reviews feeds the raw-average track instead. The cohort it is ranked inside is 2000s films — 7,847 of them.
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 Man on Wire 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 · 2000s (7,847 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 147.
Cohort: Films · 2000s
