Film · 1998 · Films · 1990s
Shakespeare in Love
Scored from 519 calibrated IMDb reviewers, each re-centered on their own rating baseline before the title is ranked. Cohort: Films · 1990s (4,082 peers).
Summary
A fictionalized account of William Shakespeare's life during the writing of Romeo and Juliet, as he becomes romantically entangled with a young noblewoman disguised as a man. The film blends historical figures with invented romance as Shakespeare finds inspiration for his masterpiece.
Shakespeare in Love is a 1998 romance, comedy and drama film starring Joseph Fiennes, Gwyneth Paltrow and Judi Dench. Its certificate is R. It runs 2h 3m. John Madden directed it. Inside comedy it is classed as Dramedy. Its country of origin is listed as the United States and the United Kingdom.
Rotten Tomatoes carries a separate audience for the same title, 6,423 of whom clear the calibration test. The calibrated figure is built from 519 reviewers whose rating history varies enough to place their own average. A broader pool of 542 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 Shakespeare in Love 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 519.
Cohort: Films · 1990s
