Film · 1989 · Films · 1980s
The Punisher
Scored from 166 calibrated IMDb reviewers, each re-centered on their own rating baseline before the title is ranked. Cohort: Films · 1980s (3,141 peers).
Summary
Former cop Frank Castle, presumed dead after his family was murdered by the mob, lives in the sewers as a one-man vigilante known as the Punisher, racking up a body count against organized crime. When the Yakuza muscle into New York and kidnap the mobsters' children to force a takeover, Castle finds himself in the uneasy position of rescuing the kids of the same men he has sworn to destroy.
The Punisher (1989) is a film IMDb files under the action, crime and thriller genres.
166 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 169 reviewers with at least two reviews each feeds the raw-average track. Its in-cohort standing is measured against the other 3,140 1980s films, not against the whole corpus.
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 Punisher 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 166.
Cohort: Films · 1980s
