Film · 1999 · Films · 1990s
October Sky
Scored from 269 calibrated IMDb reviewers, each re-centered on their own rating baseline before the title is ranked. Cohort: Films · 1990s (4,082 peers).
Summary
In the coal town of Coalwood, West Virginia, in October 1957, high-school student Homer Hickam watches Sputnik cross the night sky and decides to build rockets. With friends Roy Lee and O'Dell and the school's resident brain, Quentin, he begins launching homemade missiles on the outskirts of town, encouraged by his teacher Miss Riley and opposed by his father John, the mine superintendent, who expects his son underground. Joe Johnston's drama, adapted from Hickam's memoir Rocket Boys, follows the boys' trial-and-error engineering and their run at the county and national science fairs as the mine's fortunes decline.
October Sky (1999) is a film IMDb files under the biography, drama and family genres. It runs 1h 48m and carries a PG certificate. Its country of origin is listed as the United States.
Its in-cohort standing is measured against the other 4,081 1990s films, not against the whole corpus. Rotten Tomatoes carries a separate audience for the same title, 2,646 of whom clear the calibration test. The calibrated figure is built from 269 reviewers whose rating history varies enough to place their own average. A broader pool of 291 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 October Sky 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 269.
Cohort: Films · 1990s
