Film · 2004 · Films · 2000s
Napoleon Dynamite
Scored from 879 calibrated IMDb reviewers, each re-centered on their own rating baseline before the title is ranked. Cohort: Films · 2000s (7,847 peers).
Summary
An awkward teenager named Napoleon Dynamite spends his days in Preston, Idaho, where he struggles to fit in at school and cope with his dysfunctional family. When his best friend Pedro decides to run for class president, Napoleon steps in to help him with a campaign that becomes increasingly absurd. The film follows their misadventures as they navigate the social landscape of their small town high school.
Napoleon Dynamite is a 2004 comedy and drama film directed by Jared Hess. Jon Heder, Efren Ramirez and Aaron Ruell head the billed cast. Its certificate is PG-13. Inside comedy it is classed as Goofy. It runs 1h 26m. Its country of origin is listed as the United States.
Rotten Tomatoes carries a separate audience for the same title, 44,517 of whom clear the calibration test. Its in-cohort standing is measured against the other 7,846 2000s films, not against the whole corpus. The calibrated figure is built from 879 reviewers whose rating history varies enough to place their own average. A broader pool of 943 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 Napoleon Dynamite 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 879.
Cohort: Films · 2000s
