Film · 2005 · Films · 2000s
Murderball
Scored from 44 calibrated IMDb reviewers, each re-centered on their own rating baseline before the title is ranked. Cohort: Films · 2000s (7,847 peers).
Summary
Henry Alex Rubin and Dana Adam Shapiro's documentary follows the United States quadriplegic rugby team — the full-contact sport played in reinforced wheelchairs that its athletes still call murderball — from the 2002 world championship toward the 2004 Athens Paralympics. Its spine is the feud between Mark Zupan, the goateed, tattooed American star paralysed in a pickup truck accident, and Joe Soares, a former US great who, cut from the squad, took over as head coach of rival Canada. Alongside the training and the on-court collisions, the film sits with the players on sex, dating, drinking and the questions strangers ask, and with a newly injured motocross rider learning what the chair will mean.
Murderball (2005) is a film IMDb files under the documentary and sport genres. It was made in the United States. It runs 1h 24m and carries a PG-13 certificate.
7,846 other films from the 2000s form the cohort it is ranked inside. A second review pool sits behind it as well: 767 Rotten Tomatoes reviewers clear the same calibration test, and Rankquant scores them separately. Only 44 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 44 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 Murderball 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 44.
Cohort: Films · 2000s
