Film · 2025 · Films · 2020s
The Smashing Machine
Scored from 328 calibrated IMDb reviewers, each re-centered on their own rating baseline before the title is ranked. Cohort: Films · 2020s (7,930 peers).
Summary
A biographical drama about Mark Kerr, a dominant mixed martial arts and pugilism champion in the late 1990s and early 2000s. The film follows his rise through the PRIDE Fighting Championships in Japan while struggling with painkiller addiction and a turbulent relationship with his partner Dawn Staples. Dwayne Johnson stars as Kerr, with Emily Blunt as Dawn, in a story about the physical and emotional toll of elite combat sports.
Released in 2025, The Smashing Machine is an action, biography and drama film.
328 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 339 reviewers with at least two reviews each feeds the raw-average track. A second review pool sits behind it as well: 459 Rotten Tomatoes reviewers clear the same calibration test, and Rankquant scores them separately. Its in-cohort standing is measured against the other 7,929 2020s 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 Smashing Machine 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 · 2020s (7,930 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 328.
Cohort: Films · 2020s
