Film · 1990 · Films · 1990s
Misery
Scored from 460 calibrated IMDb reviewers, each re-centered on their own rating baseline before the title is ranked. Cohort: Films · 1990s (4,082 peers).
Summary
Paul Sheldon, a bestselling novelist, crashes his car in a Colorado blizzard just after finishing the manuscript he hopes will free him from the Victorian romance series that made his name. He is pulled from the wreck by Annie Wilkes, a former nurse living alone on a remote farm, who splints his shattered legs, installs him in her spare room and introduces herself as his number one fan. When Annie reads his latest Misery Chastain novel and learns how it ends, her devotion curdles, and Paul — immobilised, snowed in and unable to reach a telephone — has only his typewriter to work with. Rob Reiner's adaptation of the Stephen King novel keeps almost all of its suspense inside that house.
Misery is a 1990 thriller, drama and psychological thriller film directed by Rob Reiner. It runs 1h 47m. Its certificate is R. Its country of origin is listed as the United States. Kathy Bates, James Caan and Richard Farnsworth head the billed cast.
Rotten Tomatoes carries a separate audience for the same title, 6,356 of whom clear the calibration test. The calibrated figure is built from 460 reviewers whose rating history varies enough to place their own average. A broader pool of 472 reviewers with two or more reviews feeds the raw-average track instead. 4,081 other films from the 1990s form the cohort it is ranked inside.
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 Misery 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 460.
Cohort: Films · 1990s
