Film · 1962 · Films · 1960s
Requiem for a Heavyweight
Scored from 56 calibrated IMDb reviewers, each re-centered on their own rating baseline before the title is ranked. Cohort: Films · 1960s (1,929 peers).
Summary
Mountain Rivera, an aging New York heavyweight, is beaten in the opening bout by a young Cassius Clay and told by the ringside doctor that one more fight could blind him. Rod Serling adapted his own 1956 Playhouse 90 teleplay for this drama, which follows Rivera out of the ring and into the Times Square bars, gyms and employment offices where a punch-drunk fighter with no other trade looks for work. Anthony Quinn plays Rivera, Jackie Gleason his manager Maish, who bet against him and now owes money to gamblers, and Mickey Rooney the cornerman Army, who stays loyal. Julie Harris is the employment counselor who tries to place him.
Requiem for a Heavyweight (1962) is a film IMDb files under the drama and sport genres. Its certificate is Approved. Its country of origin is listed as the United States. It runs 1h 35m.
1,928 other films from the 1960s form the cohort it is ranked inside. Only 56 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 59 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 Requiem for a Heavyweight 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 · 1960s (1,929 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 56.
Cohort: Films · 1960s
