Film · 1980 · Films · 1980s
The Elephant Man
Scored from 402 calibrated IMDb reviewers, each re-centered on their own rating baseline before the title is ranked. Cohort: Films · 1980s (3,141 peers).
Summary
In 1880s London, surgeon Frederick Treves finds John Merrick, a severely deformed young man exhibited as a sideshow attraction by a brutal showman named Bytes, and brings him into the London Hospital. Presented at first as a medical curiosity, Merrick proves to be literate, articulate and devout, and Victorian society begins receiving him as a celebrated guest rather than a specimen. Treves is left to reckon with whether his own patronage is simply a more respectable form of display, while Merrick remains exposed to anyone who still sees profit in him. David Lynch's black-and-white historical drama draws on the life of Joseph Merrick and on Treves's memoirs.
The Elephant Man is a 1980 biography and drama film. Its country of origin is listed as the United Kingdom and the United States. Its certificate is PG. It runs 2h 4m.
The calibrated figure is built from 402 reviewers whose rating history varies enough to place their own average. A broader pool of 465 reviewers with two or more reviews feeds the raw-average track instead. The cohort it is ranked inside is 1980s films — 3,141 of them.
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 Elephant Man 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 402.
Cohort: Films · 1980s
