Film · 2021 · Films · 2020s
The Black Phone
Scored from 1,374 calibrated IMDb reviewers, each re-centered on their own rating baseline before the title is ranked. Cohort: Films · 2020s (7,930 peers).
Summary
In 1978 Colorado, shy 13-year-old Finney Shaw is abducted by a masked child killer known as The Grabber and held in a soundproof basement. A disconnected black phone on the wall begins ringing, carrying the voices of the killer's previous victims, who offer Finney clues and encouragement to help him escape. Meanwhile, his younger sister Gwen uses her prophetic dreams to try to find him.
The Black Phone is a 2021 horror, mystery and thriller film.
A second review pool sits behind it as well: 1,173 Rotten Tomatoes reviewers clear the same calibration test, and Rankquant scores them separately. 7,929 other films from the 2020s form the cohort it is ranked inside. 1,374 IMDb reviewers rate with enough spread for a personal baseline to be measured, and those are the ones the calibrated score reads; a separate, broader pool of 1,411 reviewers with at least two reviews each 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 Black Phone 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 · 2020s (7,930 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 1,374.
Cohort: Films · 2020s
