Film · 1988 · Films · 1980s
The Bear
Scored from 57 calibrated IMDb reviewers, each re-centered on their own rating baseline before the title is ranked. Cohort: Films · 1980s (3,141 peers).
Summary
British Columbia, 1885: an orphaned bear cub is left alone when his mother is killed in a rockfall while raiding a beehive, and he attaches himself to a huge adult male Kodiak wounded by hunters. The older bear first tolerates and then protects him, teaching him to fish and to stay hidden. Tracking both animals through the Rockies are two trappers, the veteran Bill and the younger Tom, whose relationship to the hunt is tested as the pursuit drags on. Jean-Jacques Annaud's adaptation of James Oliver Curwood's novel The Grizzly King is told almost entirely from the bears' point of view, with only scattered lines of human dialogue and no narration.
Released in 1988, The Bear is an adventure, drama and family film. Its certificate is PG. It plays in No dialogue. It runs 1h 33m. Its country of origin is listed as France.
Rotten Tomatoes carries a separate audience for the same title, 310 of whom clear the calibration test. 3,140 other films from the 1980s form the cohort it is ranked inside. Only 57 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 57 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 The Bear 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 · 1980s (3,141 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 57.
Cohort: Films · 1980s
