Film · 1998 · Films · 1990s
Stepmom
Scored from 168 calibrated IMDb reviewers, each re-centered on their own rating baseline before the title is ranked. Cohort: Films · 1990s (4,082 peers).
Summary
A successful New York photographer becomes the reluctant stepmother to the two children of her partner's ex-wife, a devoted mother who resents being replaced. When the ex-wife is diagnosed with a serious illness, the two women must set aside their animosity and find a way to share the role of mother for the sake of the kids.
Stepmom (1998) is a film IMDb files under the comedy and drama genres.
Rotten Tomatoes carries a separate audience for the same title, 5,358 of whom clear the calibration test. The calibrated figure is built from 168 reviewers whose rating history varies enough to place their own average. A broader pool of 175 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 Stepmom 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 168.
Cohort: Films · 1990s
