Film · 1999 · Films · 1990s
The Iron Giant
Scored from 439 calibrated IMDb reviewers, each re-centered on their own rating baseline before the title is ranked. Cohort: Films · 1990s (4,082 peers).
Summary
In Rockwell, Maine, in the autumn of 1957, nine-year-old Hogarth Hughes goes looking for whatever has been eating the local power station and finds a fifty-foot metal giant fallen from space, amnesiac and hungry for scrap iron. Hogarth teaches the machine to talk and hides it in the junkyard of beatnik sculptor Dean McCoppin, keeping it from his single mother Annie, a waitress, and from Kent Mansley, the government man who boards with them while hunting it. The giant is gentle and curious, but he was built as a weapon, and the sight of a gun triggers reflexes he cannot control. Brad Bird's hand-drawn feature, loosely adapted from Ted Hughes's novel The Iron Man, plays the friendship against Cold War nuclear panic.
The Iron Giant (1999) is a film IMDb files under the action, adventure and animation genres. Its country of origin is listed as the United States. Its certificate is PG. It runs 1h 26m.
Its in-cohort standing is measured against the other 4,081 1990s films, not against the whole corpus. The calibrated figure is built from 439 reviewers whose rating history varies enough to place their own average. A broader pool of 460 reviewers with two or more reviews feeds the raw-average track instead.
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 Iron Giant 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 · 1990s (4,082 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 439.
Cohort: Films · 1990s
