Film · 1979 · Films · 1970s
The Black Stallion
Scored from 100 calibrated IMDb reviewers, each re-centered on their own rating baseline before the title is ranked. Cohort: Films · 1970s (2,406 peers).
Summary
In 1946, young Alec Ramsay (Kelly Reno) is traveling with his father aboard a ship off the North African coast when he glimpses a wild Arabian stallion penned belowdecks. A storm sinks the vessel, and boy and horse wash up together on a deserted island, where across long, near-wordless stretches they learn to trust each other. Rescued and back home, Alec keeps the horse he calls the Black and falls in with Henry Dailey (Mickey Rooney), a retired trainer who sees what the animal might do on a racetrack. Carroll Ballard directed this family adventure from Walter Farley's novel, shot by Caleb Deschanel and executive produced by Francis Ford Coppola.
The Black Stallion is a 1979 adventure, family and sport film. The runtime is 117 minutes. Its country of origin is listed as the United States. Its certificate is PG.
The calibrated figure is built from 100 reviewers whose rating history varies enough to place their own average. A broader pool of 104 reviewers with two or more reviews feeds the raw-average track instead. 2,405 other films from the 1970s 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 The Black Stallion 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 · 1970s (2,406 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 100.
Cohort: Films · 1970s
