Film · 2006 · Films · 2000s
The Fountain
Scored from 688 calibrated IMDb reviewers, each re-centered on their own rating baseline before the title is ranked. Cohort: Films · 2000s (7,847 peers).
Summary
Darren Aronofsky's metaphysical drama interweaves three storylines across a thousand years: a conquistador seeking the Tree of Life for his queen, a present-day scientist desperately searching for a cure to save his dying wife, and a future traveler journeying through space with a dying tree. The film meditates on love, mortality, and the human struggle to accept death.
Released in 2006, The Fountain is a drama, mystery and romance film.
The calibrated figure is built from 688 reviewers whose rating history varies enough to place their own average. A broader pool of 728 reviewers with two or more reviews feeds the raw-average track instead. The cohort it is ranked inside is 2000s films — 7,847 of them. Rotten Tomatoes carries a separate audience for the same title, 18,765 of whom clear the calibration test.
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 Fountain 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 · 2000s (7,847 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 688.
Cohort: Films · 2000s
